Weird, gripping non-fiction. ??

Or is it horror story, historic hallucination?

Fact or fantasy?

I don’t understand what this book is talking about.

An extraordinary ‘nonfiction novel’ weaves a web of associations between the founders of quantum mechanics and the evils of two world wars

The first section of Labatut’s book moves at a dizzying pace. He begins with a guided tour of a chamber of horrors in which we encounter some of the more diabolical inventions prompted by two world wars, and are introduced to a blur of real-life characters including the drug-raddled Hermann Göring, who crushed a cyanide capsule in his mouth to avoid the hangman’s rope …

The real villain here, however, is the chemist Fritz Haber (who died in 1934), who directed the programme of poison gas attacks that killed tens of thousands of soldiers in the first world war, an accomplishment that drove his disapproving wife to suicide. …

After this hair-raising opening we are launched into somewhat more tranquil regions of spacetime, where float more familiar characters such as Einstein and other 20th-century physicists and mathematicians …

The second half of Labatut’s book is largely taken up with the struggle for supremacy in modern physics between Erwin Schrödinger and Heisenberg. …

Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present. 

Guardian review

Heisenberg and Schrödinger debate atomic particles. Einstein looks on in disgust, clinging to his worldview of Newtonian physics.