Although it’s not actually a different direction, it’s just that you were thinking of the wrong direction. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I feel like these books exist for gay men but there STILL isn’t that much for anyone else under the LBGT+ umbrella, outside YA. Initially, I thought it would be a series of unlinked stories, but then I realized that wasn't the case.

The forking paths reminded me of Borges’ El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, and the novel as a whole has some similarities. Most emotionally compelling for me were those related to the main family story, the normalcy of what society may see as an unconventional family (two gay couples), dealing with death and grief, and love as a complete acceptance of another person even if it’s seemingly irrational (a variant on Pascal’s wager).I tried hard to tie the lead-in to the chapter with the chapter content, and most of the time, I really didn't "see" it. The book was written as an extension of a post graduate student project (at Goldsmiths College, London), and I think it reflects that, with its academic and highly formalised creative writing construct. An epigraph quotes Catherine Earnshaw’s famous speech in Wuthering Heights describing dreams that “have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind”. The novel starts as a heart wrenching tale of modern parenthood, with themes as intimacy, trust and mortality as subject matter, in the Ant. I mention the subject of her degree and PhD as they so closely fit the character and nature of this book and her University (where she now works) as it effectively excludes her from the Goldsmith Prize – which is where I otherwise may have naturally expected this intriguing novel to feature.

There are a few LGBTQ+ characters included at the forefront of the cast, but they seem to exist naturally and without identity-based conflict in this world, thus failing to generate any social commentary; I think it’s very important for marginalized characters to be present in books this way, as people worth the page space without having to examine their lives for the reader’s benefit, but again it doesn’t exactly help one connect to or feel for these characters. Each of the ten chapters is themed after a famous thought experiment like the prisoner's dilemma, the philosophical zombie or the ship of Theseus. The characters, much like test persons in a trial, act under the conditions of the experiment - the reader takes on the role of a scientist studying human behavior. The prose that was of a higher calibre was in the last half of the book, where we hear from an ant and there's a big, unexpected switch to sci-fi. Although I am fairly confident I got the gist of the book and figured out many of the philosophical underpinnings .One of the consequences of the nadir of the Booker Prize, the 2011 ‘Zipalongability’ list, was the creation of the Goldsmiths Prize, by Goldsmiths University, “established in 2013, to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the College and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. This is a fascinating philosophical fiction novel with an interesting premise - each of the 10 chapters begin with a classic thought experiment, which are like writing prompts that take the book forward. I'm going to have to read this book again at some point because I fear in my enthusiasm for it I might have rushed it. Also, the chapter doesn’t necessarily explore the thought experiment itself but often uses ideas from that experiment to trigger the next phase of the story.

The experiments are renowned studies of the imagination; the stuff of philosophers and psychologists. Oh, mum, just say I’m a lesbian,’ Rachel told her when Elizabeth asked what she should tell the hairdresser who wanted to know why she hadn’t seen Rachel for so long. Moving onwards in Love and Other Thought Experiments the cleverness of the connections between the stories start to show more and more.A stand alone fictionalised work centered just on the thought experiments would have been preferable for me. Eliza wants to believe her partner but, as a scientist, can’t affirm something that doesn’t make sense (“We don’t need to resort to the mystical to describe physical processes,” she says). One night in bed Rachel wakes up terrified and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. The ant and its ontological status begin to loom over their entire life together, initiating a dialectic only love can hope to resolve.