The Solitude of Prime Numbers

A Novel

By: Paolo Giordano

Narrated by: Luke Daniels

A stunning debut novel about the intertwined destinies of two friends brought together by childhood tragedy.

A three-million-copy Italian bestseller and winner of that country’s prestigious Premio Strega award.

A prime number is inherently a solitary thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one: it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia, too, move on their own axis, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child, Alice’s overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia, she recognizes a kindred, tortured spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found.

These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia’s lives forever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem intertwined: they are divisible only by themselves and each other. But the shadow of the lost twin haunts their relationship, until a chance sighting by Alice of a woman who could be Mattia’s sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface.

A meditation on loneliness and love, The Solitude of Prime Numbers asks, can we ever truly be whole when we’re in love with another? And when Mattia is asked to choose between human love and his professional love—of mathematics—which will make him more complete?

©2010 Paolo Giordano (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"A mesmerizing portrait of a young man and woman whose injured natures draw them together over the years and inevitably pull them apart. Mr. Giordano remarkably and movingly portrays the hesitant groping toward warmth that works beneath the pair's emotional disabilities. The author works with piercing subtlety. An exquisite rendering of what one might call feelings at the subatomic level."
-Richard Eder for The New York Times

"The melancholy that hangs over The Solitude of Prime Numbers is seductive and unnerving. A-." -Entertainment Weekly

"Giordano's passionate evocation of being young and in despair will resonate strongly with readers." -USA Today

Robotic reading

The tone was too monotonous, I felt like falling asleep throughout the book. But the narrator differentiated different characters.

Nothing special

I liked the reading but the story itself didn't appeal to me. A b