Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - Hardcover

A surprise bestseller... the most interesting of the year's science books (Daily Telegraph)

The new cult book... likely to become this year's stocking-filler sensation (Evening Standard)

Sparse, elegant and most of all readable... at the end of it you feel more clever. Rovelli has achieved something unheard of in books about theoretical physics: most of the people who have started his book have also probably finished it (Tom Whipple The Times)

Everyone tells me that this year the book to read is Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Guardian)

An understanding of the world requires a basic understanding of physics; something which has just become a little easier thanks to a cult book by an Italian academic which is due to be stuffed into an extraordinary number of stockings this Christmas... Not since Stephen Hawking's (admittedly hard-going) Brief History of Time has there been such a consensual success in the science book market (Ian Thomson Spectator)

There have been plenty of attempts in recent years to explain the basic concepts of physics to us, but few as elegant and concise as Carlo Rovelli's... there's enough food for thought here to last a lifetime (Nick Rennison Daily Mail)

A slim poetic meditation... Rovelli belongs to a great Italian tradition of one-culture science writing that encompasses the Roman poet Lucretius, Galileo, Primo Levi and Italo Calvino. The physics here is comprehensible and limpid, and Rovelli gives it an edge through his clear-eyed humanistic interpretations (Best science books Independent)

A startling and illustrative distillation of centuries of science... Mr Rovelli moves elegantly between illustrative metaphors, without ever mixing or belabouring any of them... The book's triumph lies not only in presenting some of the headiest stuff science has produced in so few pages, but also in giving real insight into how science treats those ideas (Economist)

The slim volume is stereotypically the province of poetry, but this beautifully designed little book shows that science, with its curiosity, its intense engagement with what there really is, its readiness to jettison received ways of seeing, is a kind of poetry too (Financial Times)

With luck, Rovelli's charming, lyrical invitation may well achieve Feynman's original goal: to get students excited about the biggest questions in physics, inspiring them to dig in and push right to the heart of the unknown (David Kaiser Guardian)

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. He has worked in Italy and the US, and is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France. His Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is an international bestseller translated into forty-one languages.