Stephen Hawking: Prisoner of the Chair

A young man of 20 is skating with his mother on a frozen lake when he falls on the ice and cannot get up. Days later, in a London hospital, he hears the news: an illness that weakens the muscles little by little and leaves the mind untouched. He is told he has 'two years'.

This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with a boy who takes clocks apart to see how they work, follows him as a student steering his college boat at Oxford, and then as a man who loses his walking, then his hand, then his voice, while his mind travels further every year: to the beginning of the universe and to the edge of the black hole. He lived 55 years after those 'two years'. 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: bread dough with raisins swelling in the oven, a film running backwards, the edge of a waterfall that no one crosses twice. 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.