Alfred Nobel: The Merchant of Death

A morning in April 1888, in a large quiet house in Paris. A man of 54 opens the morning paper and reads the news of his own death. It was his brother who had died, but the paper took him for Alfred and wrote a cold line about him. He asks himself: is this how people will remember me?

This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with a sickly boy in Stockholm whose father lost everything in the year he was born, follows him as a young man who writes poetry and speaks 5 languages, then as the man who tames a dangerous oil until it becomes a safe paste in his hands that opens mountains for trains, and then as he writes a will on a single sheet that turns his fortune into prizes for those who have done the most good for people. 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 cup filled to the brim that any shake will spill, a small bell that wakes a whole house, a white earth that drinks oil like a sponge. 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.