A Game of Sharpened Knives

Belton, NeilNeil Belton was born in Dublin and brought up in the suburb of Clontarf. He is an Editorial Director at Faber & Faber and the author of The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty, which won the Irish Times prize in 1999.

'This is a text you will remember for years...austere, authoritative fiction, a fine and melancholy novel, its poignant insights shimmering' Hilary Mantel, Literary Review

'Neil Belton's first novel is an improbable masterpiece. It is improbable because it requires the reader to imagine what it is like to be a scientific genius. It is a masterpiece because he pulls it off' EVENING STANDARD

The reviews have been simply stunning for this debut novel set in Ireland in 1941. Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger was forced to flee Austria in 1933 after the Nazis invaded but was saved from disgrace and danger when the revolutionary Irish leader, Eamon de Valera, invited him to Ireland. The novel is set against the background of a country not truly at peace, either with Germany, or with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. Erwin Schrodinger, cosmopolitan intellectual and emotional enigma, is living in cramped exile on the outskirts of Dublin, with his wife, his lover, and their child. But in the pervading atmosphere of fear and distrust, Schrodinger lives a precarious existence, haunted by his past and by mysterious threats in the present.

'This is a text you will remember for years...austere, authoritative fiction, a fine and melancholy novel, its poignant insights shimmering' Hilary Mantel, Literary Review