SCHRoeDINGER'S WIFE

A novel of love, intimate secrets, uncertainty and scientific revelation

When Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger is diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1922, he and his young wife Anny visit a Swiss sanatorium. Three years later Schroedinger returns to Arosa, not with Anny, but with a mysterious woman. While there he makes a ground-breaking discovery in quantum physics — but the woman disappears, and when Anny secretly reads Schroedinger's diary — usually meticulously kept — she is puzzled by the gaps. Where is the record of Arosa? What happened to the missing journal — and to Schroedinger at the time of his greatest scientific revelation?

Set in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Oxford in the 1920s and 30s, we follow Anny and Erwin's peripatetic life against the backdrop of the rise of fascism and Schroedinger's struggle for academic recognition — and Anny's realisation that she has married a compulsive philanderer. Told in both their voices, readers will be intrigued and tantalised by the hidden life of a famous scientist and the equally complex heart of the woman who chose to stay with him through his numerous infidelities — even helping to raise his children by other women.

SCHRoeDINGER'S WIFE explores ideas of images and doubling, borders and uncertainty, bearing witness and being watched —and how much people can pretend not to see. Reflecting on the elusive nature of memory and, indeed, reality, it shows how the human heart remains as complex as the nature of quantum physics itself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pippa Goldschmidt has a PhD in astronomy from the University of Edinburgh and worked as an astronomer and on outer space policy for many years. Her debut novel THE FALLING SKY was described by Stephen Fry as ‘a delicate and fascinating study of a life in which intellect and external microscopic and cosmic fields interact'.

In Spring 2020, Pippa will complete MEAN FREE PATH, a collection of short stories about science, speculative futures and the uncanny. Also under way is a memoir, THE AIR THAT LIFTS THE EARTH, centred around Pippa's reflection on her German Jewish ancestry and her experience in science, along with her recent acquisition, after the Brexit Referendum, of German citizenship.