Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

Product Information

Each of the ten chapters is themed after a famous thought experiment like the prisoner's dilemma, the philosophical zombie or the ship of Theseus.

Interesting read definitely, goes in sometimes unforeseen directions, makes you think constantly and takes some keeping up with in the second half but not to an unmanageable extent. There is a whole book here and when her publishers had decided to release a commercial work of fiction I think it would have worked really well if Sophie Ward had scaled back on her overall ambition (less creative writing) and expanded the love story. Joyce, in Work in Progress, combines it with the English amazing to coin the adjective ameising, meaning wonder inspired by an ant. Everything after that is complicated, as we have one chapter narrated by the ant, which is nibbling away on Rachel’s tumour and we have Arthur who becomes an astronaut flying missions to Mars. Sophie Ward's writing is as clear as a knife sounded against a glass and just as attention-grabbing.

I’ve read too many books recently where I really admired the craft and the writing, but didn’t emotionally connect, so I’ll be avoiding this one. Although it’s not actually a different direction, it’s just that you were thinking of the wrong direction. The prose is sharp and confident, in a way that you very soon get a picture of the characters ( She had become the sort of person she approved of but she wasn’t sure she had chosen anything she actually wanted).

And, I could se where all of this is going as the links between the stories are more or less evident. Photograph: Jonas Hafner/EyeEm/Getty Images View image in fullscreen One of Ward’s characters believes that an ant has separated itself from its colony to bore through her eye and penetrate her brain.I was expecting a speculative or magical realism or maybe even surrealism novel and this one verges much more on Sci-fi.