Princeton. New Jersey.

14th March 1954

'Albert Einstein speaking.'

'Who?' asks the girl on the telephone.

'I'm sorry,' she says. 'I have the wrong number.'

'You have the right number,' Albert says.

From a wrong number to a friendship that would impact both their lives, Albert Einstein Speaking begins with two unlikely friends - the world's most respected scientist and a schoolgirl from New Jersey. From their first conversation Mimi Beaufort had a profound effect on Einstein and brought him, in his final years, back to life. In turn he let her into his world.

Albert Einstein Speaking is the story of an incredible friendship, and of a remarkable life. The son of an electrician in nineteenth-century Germany, Albert Einstein went on to become one of the twentieth century's most influential scientists and the most famous face in the world. This riotous, charming and moving novel spans almost a century of European history and shines a light on the real man behind the myth.

Review

Out of this well-documented life, R.J. Gadney has conjured, with an accomplished novelist’s art, a strange and luminous fiction, a literary gem beautifully and cunningly poised between historical truth and the warmly imagined. Its finale is deeply affecting. (–Ian McEwan)

About the Author

R.J. Gadney was a writer, artist and academic. He was born in Cross Hills, Yorkshire in 1941. He studied English, Fine Art and Architecture at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1970 he became a part-time Tutor at the Royal College of Art and later became the youngest Pro-Rector in the history of the College. He lectured at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, Harvard, MIT, at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Moscow. He wrote several screenplays for television, wrote for The Spectator, the London Magazine and the Evening Standard and authored several crime and thriller novels. He died in May 2018.