Transient Luminous Events

“You would expect, perhaps, a physicist to write a book like this—a fine-tuned Schubert sonata, ticking away like clockwork, all it needs to be, with nothing in excess, a chamber piece of quiet and insistent beauty.”
-Paul Verhaeghen, author of Omega Minor.

When an intelligent young deaf man turns to burglary as an income supplement, his innate honesty entangles him in a series of seemingly unrelated events. But science tells us that all things are connected—his theft of an herb that could be an asthmatic child’s medicine, the sister’s anger, policemen at the door, buried treasure…and the weather. Transient Luminous Events is charged with real electrical current: Lightning storms mark important turning points in the novel, but also allude to the random, unpredictable nature of decisions and outcomes. How will the thief evade the law? In what universe will the child recover his health? Who can be trusted, who ignored?
Throughout the book, an atmosphere of magical realism endowed by quantum physics concepts—multiverses, in particular (the possibility of multiple pasts and futures branching into and out of any event)—place the reader in doubt about his or her own world. It will appeal to readers who liked “A Tale for the Time Being,” “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” or “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.”
The author is a PhD physicist, who has published a series of non-fiction books on the Periodic Table of the Elements, but her interests in deaf culture, optical illusions, and quantum mechanics (particularly Everett’s Many Worlds Theory) have driven this first novel.