LOVE AND OTHER CONSERVED QUANTITIES

Somewhere in the drizzle of the North-East Riding stands a university that has never quite recovered from being built. Its canteen soup develops opinions. Its lost-property office discovers that umbrellas, once surrendered, refuse to be lost. A grieving man chases a hat that obeys the uncertainty principle, and a woman who presses flowers for a living finds that time is not a corridor but a room she can see all at once.

In these ten stories, John B. Sullivan borrows the findings of physics — conservation, entropy, uncertainty, entanglement — and discovers, each time, that the scientists have been writing love stories for a century and filing them under the wrong subject. A dog is a warm thing on a short arrow. A persistent current, once started, never stops. Two strangers two hundred miles apart are joined by a thread that carries nothing and means everything.

By turns absurd and tender, these are tales of quiet loss and stubborn hope, where the impossible arrives without paperwork and nobody is so rude as to ask it how. For readers of magical realism who like their strangeness warm, and their science slightly, beautifully wrong.