THE STONE LOVES THE WORLD
A warm, inventive, and multilayered novel about two families – one made up largely of scientists and the other of artists – whose worlds collide in pursuit of a lost daughter
Mette, a twenty-year old programmer of visual effects for video games, lives with her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright, in Brooklyn. Mette is a private and socially awkward young woman, who finds something consoling in repetitive mathematical calculations. But she has been recently rejected in love, and feels stuck in an endless loop, no longer certain of her place in the world.
As Brian Hall’s new novel opens, Mette has gone missing. Her disappearance forces Saskia to reunite with Mette’s father, Mark, an emotionally distant astronomy professor in Ithaca, to embark on a journey together to find her.
Playing out over nine decades and three generations, and stitching together a dazzling array of subjects–from cosmology and classical music to number theory and medieval mystery plays–The Stone Loves the World is a story of love, longing, and scientific wonder. It offers a moving reflection on the human search for truth, meaning, and connection in an often incomprehensible universe, and on the genuine surprises that the real world, and human society, can offer.
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Advance praise for The Stone Loves the World
“[A] strikingly original take on science, uncertainty, and the longing for connection to others and to the world . . . Hall takes a risk with sprawling, dense passages, and pulls it off by majestically drawing together the various threads of this consistently moving and entirely unconventional narrative. It’s a stellar achievement.”
—Publishers Weekly (STARRED)
“An expansive story that explores love and humanity through the binary of arts and sciences . . . charming . . . a lovely look at relationships and the different ways people see the world . . . The Stone Loves the World lays out the beautiful complexities of how generations can culminate in a person, as well as the strength and power of family even when you least expect it.”
—Harvard Crimson
“Hall does an impressive job channeling his characters’ intensely idiosyncratic personal monologues and their interests . . . while the novel touches on an almost unwieldy array of themes, one constant throughout is the impossibility of exerting logic and control on a fundamentally unpredictable world. A valiant attempt to encapsulate life, the universe, and everything.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A brilliant, brainy book about physics, astronomy, video games and the American Century. Hall’s intricate family saga charts vast social shifts even as it maps the emotional ups and downs of vivid individual lives. His characters’ considerable smarts can’t save them from the mess of their emotional mistakes, but how they deal, and how they heal, gives the novel its irresistible narrative power.”
—Geraldine Brooks, author of The Secret Chord
“In its patient, heartbreakingly comic evocation of loneliness across several generations, The Stone Loves the World recalls no novel so much as The Corrections. Jam-packed with Boomer iconography and scientific arcana, this long-awaited new novel shows off Brian Hall’s immense talents. A deep and moving portrait of an unforgettable, very American family.””
—Stewart O’Nan, author of Emily, Alone and Henry, Himself
“A detonation of a novel, breathtaking in its reach, brilliant in execution. I could say that in its verbal audacity and omnivorous curiosity it recalls Eugenides and Pynchon, or that in its fascination with the ways of science and music it’s reminiscent of Musil and Mann, but I’d be omitting worlds: its nimbleness, its contemporary flash, its courage, its irrepressible humor. In this extraordinary portrait of three generations of Americans burdened and blessed by genius, Hall has given us both a freeze-frame of our particular historical moment and a panoramic view of what used to be called ‘the human condition.’”
—Mark Slouka, author of Nobody’s Son
“Brian Hall is brilliant, and he has written a wonderful, brainy, soulful novel that reaches wide and deep. Its characters are particular and achingly human. The Stone Loves the World is capacious, full of ideas as well as real heart.”
—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Innocents and Others
“I think Brian Hall is one of our greatest living authors and his latest reaffirms that status: it’s a sprawling, multigenerational drama that reintroduces both Hall’s exuberant genius and Saskia White, a protagonist that I first fell head-over-heels for twenty-five years ago in the pages of The Saskiad. The Stone Loves the World is a brilliant and entrancing follow-up and—simply put—it’s one of the best novels I’ve read in quite some time.”
—Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy
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