Madhur Anand

The book’s first sentence sets us firmly in time and place: “Rivière-à-Pierre, the Gaspé Peninsula, winter 1933.” But very soon, the reader understands that this story will take place, like a fairy tale, largely in a world that transcends time and place. It is told in the voice of an eleven-year old girl (clearly the namesake of the…

  Danish astronomers have just discovered sugar   — simple molecules of glycolaldehyde — floating in the gas around a young, sun-like star, four hundred light years away. The molecules are falling toward a binary star, a system of two bodies, one primary, one companion, orbiting about a common centre of mass. This space sugar, they…