Finalist for the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

"A gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris. . . . [Labatut] casts the flickering light of gothic fiction on 20th-century science. In five free-floating vignettes, he illuminates the kinship of knowledge and destruction, brilliance and madness. . . . His prose is masterfully paced and vividly rendered in Adrian Nathan West's magnetic translation." --Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times Book Review

"When We Cease to Understand the World fuses fact and fiction to turn the modern history of physics into a gripping narrative of obsessed scientists, world-changing discoveries, and the ultimate results--often quite dark--of our drive to understand the fundamental workings of the universe." --John Williams, The New York Times Book Review Podcast

"[When We Cease to Understand the World] is as compact and potent as a capsule of cyanide, a poison whose origin story takes up much of the opening chapter--the first of many looping forays into the wonders and horrors unleashed by science in the past few centuries. . . . It is a meditation in prose that bears a familial relationship to the work of W. G. Sebald or Olga Tokarczuk: a sequence of accounts that skew biographical but also venture into the terrain of imagination. . . . The stories in this book nest inside one another, their points of contact with reality almost impossible to fully determine." --Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

"Darkly dazzling. . . [Labatut] illustrates the unbreakable bond between horror and beauty, life-saving and life-destroying. . . . This book--as haunting as it is erudite--stubbornly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific advancement to the atrocities of history." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Labatut's stylish English-language debut offers an embellished, heretical, and thoroughly engrossing account of the personalities and creative madness that gave rise to some of the 20th century's greatest scientific discoveries. . . [Labatut's] subject is the all-consuming human drive to discover, and the danger therein. . . Hard to pin down and all the more enjoyable for it, this unique work is one to be savored." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[When We Cease to Understand the World] rattles the prevailing narrative of heroic scientific innovators." --Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times

"Absolutely brilliant. I was utterly gripped and wolfed it down. It feels as if he has invented an entirely new genre." --Mark Haddon

"A thrilling account of theories of physics, and as a series of highly-wrought imaginative extrapolations about the physicists who arrived at them." --Geoff Dyer

"When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut is the strangest and most original book I've read for years. It hovers in a state between fiction and non-fiction, or wave and particle, and makes an account of modern mathematics and science into something as eerie as a great ghost story." --Philip Pullman, New Statesman, 'Books of the Year'

"A dazzling associative caper full of graceful arabesques linking continents and centuries and ideas." --The Sunday Times Culture

"Remind[s] us of fiction's power to take us to another world and expand our understanding of this one . . . When We Cease to Understand the World showcases the minds seeking to pierce the mysterious heart of mathematics." --The Guardian, 'Biggest books of autumn'

"It may be possible to actually feel your brain getting bigger as you read." --Evening Standard

"Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present." --John Banville, The Guardian

"An exquisitely written and continuously fascinating hybrid work of fiction and history." --Catherine Taylor, The Irish Times

"Wholly mesmerising and revelatory . . . Completely fascinating." --William Boyd