In the Light of What We Know
Author | Rahman, Zia Haider |
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Year | 2014 |
First published | 2014 |
Publisher | New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux |
Number of pages | 512 |
Edition | First US hardback |
ISBN | 9780374175627 |
Keywords | mathematics, literary or mainstream, scientists' social responsibility, minority (race, disability), postcolonial issues/setting |
Abstract
One
September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his
career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise
visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a
South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost
friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under
mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession
of unsettling power.
In the Light of What We Know takes us
on a journey of exhilarating scope—from Kabul to London, New York,
Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton—and explores the great questions of
love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the
friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor,
a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks
atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but
finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world—and,
ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the
clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles
the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as
they struggle to tame their futures. (Publisher)