Everything There Is by M.G. Vassanji

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.

M.G. VASSANJI won the Giller Prize for The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction for A Place Within: Rediscovering India. His novel The Assassin’s Song was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Most recently, his novel Nostalgia was a finalist in Canada Reads 2017.

Author Residence: Toronto, ON

Author Hometown: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania