Song of Two Worlds

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A crumbling villa on the Mediterranean, a middle-aged Muslim man and his servant, and a tragic story shrouded in mystery. Join Alan Lightman, author of EINSTEIN’S DREAMS, on this unusual journey to explore questions with answers and questions without answers. In SONG OF TWO WORLDS, we meet a man who has lost his faith in all things following a mysterious personal tragedy.

After decades of living “hung like a dried fly,” emptied and haunted by his past, the narrator awakens one morning revitalized and begins a Dante-like journey to find something to believe in, first turning to the world of science and then to the world of philosophy, religion, and human life. As his personal story is slowly revealed, little by little, we confront the great questions of the cosmos and of the human heart, some questions with answers and others without.

Advance Praise

“Full of context, atmosphere, and vivid imagery, and yet ultimately abstract, SONG OF TWO WORLDS shows us a serious, passionate man who straddles the worlds of scientific and poetic enterprise. We feel the consolations of the mathematical line and we feel the seductions of the strummed chord of the oud, and between these we feel the altogether human pressure to make a whole life out of our fragmented, multiple universe.”

—Erica Funkhouser, Poet, author of The Actual World, Pursuit, and Earthly

“Alan Lightman sheds rare light on the wondrous meeting ground of poetry and science in his book-length poem SONG OF TWO WORLDS. In our hands comes a true gift, a lyric and absorbing journey through the universe and the mind of a man as attuned to its mysteries as to its beauty.”

—Roald Hoffmann, Nobel-Prize winning chemist and poet