Ideal Algebra

Ideal Algebra

a novel by Michael Charles Tobias

Paperback price: $ 18
ISBN: 9780927379595

It is the early 21st century, in central London, and a lovely, extraordinarily gifted teenager, Cynthia Diana Nemorensis, suddenly inherits a six-page letter replete with abstruse mathematical equations from her Middle School algebra teacher, Mr. Justinian Verne. This young woman, accustomed to spending time beneath Isaac Newton’s apple tree at the famed manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, finds herself overwhelmed by urgent secrets and insanely precarious injunctions upon which hangs the fate of the world, and certainly her own personal survival.

Young Cynthia is not alone in the sudden explosion of these algebraic revelations: Three of her male classmates know that she has taken possession of this treasure map and appear prepared to go to any length to obtain it.

The worst earthquake in Britain’s history, and a new Ice Age are but preludes to a biological cascade of hybrid futures scathingly laid bare in this technological and moral dystopian ticking-clock of life and death. Cynthia must decode her teacher’s devastating legacy, down to the second, unraveling mind-altering algorithms that jettison her upon an odyssey from a mountain of gemstones in Australia and an obscure lake in Vietnam, to a tortuous archaeological labyrinth in northern Iraq, the highest sand dune in the world, to an absolutely perfect set of waterfall-laden coordinates in northern Scotland.

True to his literary trademark, prolific author, ecologist, filmmaker and explorer Michael Charles Tobias has delivered a deeply provocative, existential and shattering thriller without precedent. Not one page nor paragraph is predictable. And the ending is utterly indescribable.