Synopsis
Cloud Atlas meets Forrest Gump meets Albert Einstein in this fast-paced, grippingly brilliant 8-billion-year biography of the universe’s most interesting iron atom.
Born from a dying red giant, the atom Fe orbits the early Solar system, trapped aboard an iron-nickel asteroid. Now, after billions of years of waiting, Fe is about to fall to Earth and into the clutches of vicious and clever Homo sapiens...
Benjamin Bronte’s debut novel FE: AN ATOM’S TALE (Elegua Editions, 2024) is an ingenious telling of humanity’s past, present, and future, all through the quantum-scale perspective of a single atom. Near-indestructible and ineffably magnetic, Fe is a hero like no other. After its flaming, plummeting asteroid slams into the sands of ancient Mesopotamia, Fe finds itself forged into a deadly weapon by powerful princes whose peoples have not yet discovered the secret of iron smelting.
Time, gravity, and fundamental forces march ever onwards, leaving unforgettable characters and their deeply-human narratives behind, following the immortal and infinitesimal Fe to its next grand adventure. Thrilling scenes of the Second World War give way to the humorous, and often maddening, complexity of our own overconnected 21st-century world–only for Fe to leave Earth forever, welded into a spaceship, destined to settle other worlds…