Everything There Is

By: M.G. Vassanji

Narrated by: Vik Sahay, Leslie Ann Sheppard

From two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, one of Canada’s finest and most celebrated writers, comes a brilliant new novel that vividly examines the seemingly incongruous worlds of science, religion and desire.

Nurul Islam is a world-renowned physicist, professor at Imperial College, London, and one half of the Islam-Rosenfeld theory, the first step in a grand unification of forces and a Theory of Everything. A family man profoundly influenced by his pious father, Nurul is happily married to Sakina Begum by an arranged marriage. They have three children. But when Nurul travels to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to give a public lecture at Harvard, he falls in love with a graduate student, Hilary Chase.

At the same time, Nurul Islam's outspoken, philosophical views about the nature of physics and God have earned him the ire of fundamentalist preachers in Pakistan. He makes enemies of the political and military establishments when he refuses to contribute to Pakistan's nuclear weapons project. Meanwhile, a contingent of physicists begins a smear campaign, claiming that Nurul Islams's contribution to the unification theory was plagiarized. All these events converge upon Sakina Begum who, smarting from her husband's betrayal, unwittingly commits a betrayal of her own. Everything that has worked together as though preordained since his childhood to take him to the pinnacle of scientific achievement suddenly falls apart.

An exceptionally wise and intimate account of love, honour, guilt and genius, Everything There Is gives us an engaging portrait of a traditional, spiritual man facing the onslaught of inescapable forces.

Critic reviews

"[The book's] unvarnished prose and hypnotic intensity . . . make for an enthralling primer for novel writing itself."
—The Globe and Mail

"Vassanji brings together complex strands and unifies them into a compelling chronicle, a symmetry of ideas and emotions, a tale told with sensitivity and grace and a light touch. A must read for those who love literature and care about people and personalities shunned by the powers-that-be."
—Shaukat Ajmeri, author of Keepers of the Faith

"A biography masquerading as a novel dipping into the realm of speculative fiction is a hat trick few authors can pull off. Yet . . . Vassanji manages to do just that."
—The Globe and Mail

"An extraordinarily moving novel that leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of our increasingly volatile world. This is Vassanji's masterpiece."
—Susan Zakin, Journal of the Plague Years

An excellent narrative which brought to life the story and times of a brilliant man. A power

A powerful insight into the life and humanity of a Nobel prize laureate. It also is a love story and a commentary on society’s mores and morals. The pain and devastation of the loss of a child was graphically portrayed. Apart from the quality of the literary work I was kept spellbound by the narration by the readers and the impressive accentuation of the different characters by Vik Sahay.