A book about freedom. The novel won the Magnesia Litera Award 2018 for Best Prose
The narrator Ada Sabová, a young scientist at the "Institute of Interdisciplinary Human Studies", is in many ways a typical (but not stereotypical) modern intellectual trying to balance her personal life and career.
She has already been through a lot in both, leaving her with a certain cynicism, or rather a learned, sarcastic perception of the world, the people around her, and herself. Set against the backdrop of the search for her colleague's missing son, she notes seeming coincidences around her, sensing an underlying order and interconnectedness.
She seeks an overarching definition for all these phenomena, her "theory of strangeness", only to find that she cannot grasp the infinite complexity of the world through intellect alone. And while society around her clings increasingly to hollow rules, Ada abandons its structures one by one and heads towards freedom.
