Marie Curie: A Woman in the Dark

A night in 1902 in Paris. Marie and Pierre Curie walk back after dinner to the wooden shed where they have worked for 4 years. They open the door and do not light the lamp. On the shelves, small bottles glow by themselves in the dark with a faint blue light.

This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with a little girl in Warsaw gazing at the scientific instruments in her father's glass cabinet, follows her as she works for years so her sister can study and then travels to Paris by train with a folding chair, and then as she boils brown earth in a big iron pot to draw out an amount of radium smaller than a grain of rice. The events, dates and names are real, and the story is told in scenes and dialogue as if you were watching it.

The science is explained with pictures from daily life: a wind you cannot see that bends the trees, a needle in a haystack, sugar drawn out of a beet root. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined in every chapter.

The book is written in Arabic.