Alan Lightman

The internationally bestselling author of Einstein's Dreams presents a celebration of the highs and lows of existence, on the grandest possible scale: the story of Creation, as told by God.
Once before time existed, Mr g woke up from a nap and decided to create the universe. In the shimmering Void, where he lives with his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, he creates time, space, and matter. Soon follow stars, planets, animate matter,...

From the bestselling author of Einstein’s Dreams comes this harrowing tale of one man's struggle to cope in a wired world, even as his own biological wiring short-circuits.
As Boston’s Red Line shuttles Bill Chalmers to work one summer morning, something extraordinary happens. Suddenly, he can't remember which stop is his, where he works, or even who he is. The only thing he can remember is his corporate motto: the maximum...

Charles, a once-promising poet, is a professor at a minor liberal arts college, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Now living a desperately comfortable existence, he decides to return to his thirtieth college reunion.
While there, he relives an intense love affair he had with a beautiful ballerina that forever changed his life.  At times shocked, admiring, and furious with his younger self, Charles remembers contradictory...

"Modern science teaches us that anything can be explained in terms of atoms and forces, including the inner workings of the brain. But certain personal experiences can challenge the idea that there's nothing beyond inert matter. Communing with nature, working through a complex problem, or experiencing a piece of art, we sometimes feel a powerful sense of transcendence, of connecting with a cosmic unity that may seem unexplainable by science. But according...

"Lightman's grandfather M.A. Lightman was the family's undisputed patriarch: it was his movie theater empire that catapulted the Lightmans to prominence in the South, his fearless success that both galvanized and paralyzed his children and grandchildren. In this ... memoir, the author chronicles his return to Memphis in an attempt to understand the origins he so eagerly left behind forty years earlier. As aging uncles and aunts begin telling family...

A fictional work in which a twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein, working in a patent office in Switzerland, imagines possible worlds in which time works differently as he formulates his theory of relativity.

Three Flames portrays the struggles of a Cambodian farming family against the extreme patriarchal attitudes of their society and a cruel and dictatorial father, set in a rural community that is slowly being exposed to the modern world and its values. Ryna is a mother fighting against memories of her father's death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and her powerful desire for revenge. Daughter Nita is married off at sixteen to a wandering husband, while...