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A new standalone science fiction novel from Cixin Liu, the bestselling and award-winning author of The Three-Body Problem .

When Chen´s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this enigmatic natural phenomenon. His search takes him to across mountain peaks and deep into highly classified subterranean labs.

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´Cixin Liu is the author of your next favourite sci-fi novel´ WIRED .

On his fourteenth birthday, right before his eyes, Chen´s parents are incinerated by a blast of ball lightning. Striving to make sense of this bizarre tragedy, he dedicates his life to a single goal: to unlock the secrets of this enigmatic natural phenomenon . His pursuit of ball lightning will take him far from home, across mountain peaks chasing storms and deep into highly classified subterranean laboratories as he slowly unveils a new frontier in particle physics.

Chen´s obsession gives purpose to his lonely life, but it can´t insulate him from the real world´s interest in his discoveries. He will be pitted against scientists, soldiers and governments with motives of their own: a physicist who has no place for moral judgement in his pursuit of knowledge; a beautiful army major obsessed with new ways to wage war ; a desperate nation facing certain military defeat.

Conjuring awe-inspiring new worlds of cosmology and philosophy from meticulous scientific speculation, Ball Lightning has all the scope and imagination that so enthralled readers of Cixin Liu´s award-winning Three-Body trilogy .

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´A striking, strange and sometimes quite chewy standalone novel about the uneasy alliance between cutting-edge scientific research and the agencies that fund it´ SFX .

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Martinsen, Joel
Joel Martinsen is the translator of The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu and (with Alice Xin Liu) of The Problem With Me , a collection of essays by Han Han. His translations of short fiction have appeared in Pathlight, Chutzpah, and Words Without Borders. He lives in Beijing.

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