From two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, one of Canada's
finest and most celebrated writers, comes a brilliant new novel that
vividly examines the seemingly incongruous worlds of science, religion
and desire
Nurul Islam is a world-renowned physicist, professor at Imperial
College, London, and one half of the Islam-Rosenfeld theory, the first
step in a grand unification of forces and a Theory of Everything. A
sensitive character, from a small town in undivided India, a family man
profoundly influenced by his pious father, Nurul is happily married to
Sakina Begum by an arranged marriage. They have three children. But when
Nurul travels to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to give a public lecture at
Harvard, he falls in love with a graduate student, Hilary Chase.
At the same time Nurul Islam's outspoken, philosophical views about the
nature of physics and God have earned him the ire of fundamentalist
preachers in Pakistan. When approached to contribute to Pakistan's
nuclear weapons project, he declines, recalling the catastrophe of
India's Partition, thus making enemies of the political and military
establishments. Meanwhile, a contingent of physicists begins a smear
campaign, claiming that Nurul Islams's contribution to the unification
theory was plagiarized from Rosenfeld. All these events link together
and converge upon Sakina Begum who, smarting from her husband's
betrayal, unwittingly commits a betrayal of her own. Everything that had
worked together as though preordained since his childhood to take him to
the pinnacle of scientific achievement suddenly falls apart.
An intimate and intelligent account of love, honour, guilt and genius,
Everything There Is gives us an engaging portrait of a traditional,
spiritual man facing the onslaught of inescapable forces.
