David Eagleman's SUM
Sum is an internationally bestselling book of fiction published in 27 countries and languages. It was selected as Book of the Week by both The Guardian and The Week, and named a Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, Chicago Tribune, New Scientist, The Guardian, and The Scotsman.
At one point, Sum was ranked by Amazon as the #2 bestselling book in the United Kingdom.
"This little book is teeming, writhing with imagination."
- Los Angeles Times
"Eagleman is a true original. Read Sum and be amazed. Reread it and be reamazed all over again."
- Time Magazine
"Sum has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius"
- The Guardian
"Imaginative and inventive."
- Wall Street Journal
"You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's Sum. If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats."
- Stephen Fry
"Absolutely exquisite."
- Hugh Laurie
"Witty, bright, sharp and unexpected . . . as surprising a book as I've read for years. Every story is a new Heaven."
- Brian Eno
"A very well-written, very funny and very thought-provoking book that makes you realize that when it comes to the afterlife, most religions suffer from an acute shortage of imagination."
- Yuval Noah Harari
"SUM is terrific. It's such a good idea that I was grinding my teeth all the way through wishing I'd thought of it first. The inventiveness, the clarity and wit of the prose, the calm air of moral understanding that pervades the whole thing, add up to something completely original."
- Philip Pullman
"Brilliantly realised, blazingly original."
- Sunday Herald
"Formidably imagined ... never short of new ideas, all of them rolled out with style."
- Nicholas Tucker, Independent
"This delightful, thought-provoking little collection belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments ... full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side."
- Alexander McCall Smith,The New York Times
"As rigorous and imaginative as the writings of Italo Calvino and Alan Lightman, each vignette is a glimpse into an expansive topic such as time, faith or memory"
- Nature
"David Eagleman's SUM envisions a multiplicity of afterlives: pasts relived in shuffle mode, cast in the dreams of others, and dictated by our credit card reports"
- Vanity Fair
"Reading this beautiful book is like pulling back the fabric of reality and peeping behind -- life and death will never seem the same again."
- New Scientist
"Creatively conceived and deftly described. Each tale imagines an unexpected reality that might await us, possible worlds that illuminate life with colors rarely encountered."
- Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe
"A disarming, splendid little book.... Eagleman packs in an afterlife's worth of possibilities, all intriguing and extraordinarily well-written, and most tinged with a beguiling gentleness, humor and optimism.... It made my heart light"
- Dallas Morning News
"This is a scientist and exceptionally talented writer using the idea of the afterlife to reflect on our innermost fears and desires and also as a way of dissecting how we live."
- Tampa Tribune
"Sum has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius."
- Geoff Dyer, Observer
"A neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms.... Eagleman's turned out a well-executed and thought-provoking book."
- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"These images of the Great Beyond are more complex, sometimes whimsical, always veering off in an unexpected direction. In total they present a realm where you are certain to learn something about the life you just left behind."
- Deseret News
"SUM is an imaginative and provocative book that gives new perspectives on how to view ourselves and our place in the world."
- Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
From the jacket:
SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered -- each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.
In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together.
These wonderfully imagined tales -- at once funny, wistful, and unsettling -- are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.
Click the links on the righthand menu to learn more about the book.
