I’m not at all sure what this odd book was supposed to be, and I’m not sure the author did either. The blurb makes much of the framing device which involves a New York teenager, Mimi Beaufort, accidentally calling Albert Einstein on his 75th birthday. This is the “incredible friendship” that apparently changes both of their lives. Except it is hardly mentioned at all in the text. I went in expecting a fictionalised relationship that would provide a new perspective on a complex man with an incredible legacy, I assumed that Mimi and Einstein’s conversations would touch on his scientific thinking and humanitarian ideas and that Gadney would use this to shed new light on the man, his ideas and his life. Instead, after the initial brief telephone conversation, what you get is a bland recitation of Einstein’s life made up primarily of his basic biography and (often) long excerpts from his personal papers, many of which are repeated more than once.

Einstein comes across as unpleasant, which is fine as his behaviour towards the women in his life was frankly deplorable. The problem is that he doesn't feel real, a particularly egregious fault in a character who happens to be one of the most famous men in history. There is no enthusiasm for the man or his work in Gadney’s writing; there’s no excitement is his discoveries, no insight into his ideas about humanity or physics. It reads more like a plan for a biography (or, dare I say, a Wikipedia article) barely fleshed out with extremely brief imagined dialogue. It has an unfinished, under-developed feel but there is also a bizarre tendency to dwell on insignificant details such as the type of a paddle-steamer, shopping lists and over-precise geography. Perhaps the intention was to create realism but the effort would have been better spent on fleshing out the characters and the important episodes of a remarkable life.