August

Description

Trapped in a car wreck, upside down, bleeding, broken and in pain, Tristan and Grace are staring at death. As they await their fate, with only a glimmer of hope they might be seen and rescued, we discover the stories of their lives, the sequences of events that brought them together and the shocking truth behind the cause of their crash. Tristan, a brilliant student at the privileged St Augustine's school within the walls of the City, was the subject of an elaborate series of experiments on the seemingly contradictory concepts of determinism and free will. Part willing participant and part unknowing victim, Tristan grapples with the apparent irrefutability of a deterministic world. There is only one thing that distracts him: a woman he has glimpsed only twice, a woman he longs to know, a woman he loves. Banished from the City at the end of the experiments, he embarks on a desperate personal quest to find the woman and to prove the existence of free will, a proof he cannot live without. Meanwhile, Grace grows up outside the City walls, in a place of impoverishment and despair. Her life of hardship allows no place for philosophical musing. Forced through desperation into a life of prostitution, her only hope of escape from the life she leads is the young man she has seen watching her, the young man who would not speak to her. The young man who stopped at the roadside and picked her up in his car...

Bernard Beckett was awarded a Royal Society Fellowship for Teachers of Maths, Science and Technology in 2005, during which he worked at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Evolution. That year, he found himself looking for a way to combine his passions for science, philosophy and storytelling. Falling for Science is his first non-fiction book. He's written several novels, won many awards for his fiction. His lnovel Genesis was also written as a result of his time at the Allan Wilson Centre. This 'otherworldly' sci-fi thriller was winner of the Young Adult Fiction category in the NZ Post 2007 Book Awards. His other books are No Alarms, Malcolm and Juliet, Jolt, Deep Fried, Home Boys and Acid Song.