The beauty and endless mysteries of mathematics are central to this work of fiction. Continuums is partly about the resolution of Cantor’s Conjecture, or the Continuum Hypothesis partly about people trapped in their own worlds, unable to find a way out. Alexandra is a brilliant mathematician whose career and family unravel following the flight of her brother from Communist Romania. She finally departs for North America and leaves behind her husband and daughter. Asuero Aroso is Alexandra’s first mentor and, then, colleague. An extraordinary but obscure mathematician stuck in Romania, he is a Sephardic Jew, born in Istanbul, a former student of the eminent David Hilbert in the days when Gottingen was the world center of mathematics. His is the story of a young genius, of an incompatible and unhappy marriage, of an epochal mathematics discovery left unheralded, of a man caught in an absurd and cruel political system. Robert Carr has created a bold, imaginative and engaging novel.

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Robert Carr fled from the Communist regime at the age of twenty-four. He then moved from France to Israel and then settled in Canada. He was trained as an engineer and worked in the aerospace industry. He now writes full time and lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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“In this remarkable first novel, Robert Carr asks age-old questions about the heart in conflict with itself: how do we choose between our life’s work and the needs of loved ones?...Carr manages deftly to draw us into his characters’ lives, such that, by turns, we agonize and rejoice with each of them, particularly with Aroso, the outgoing genius, and Alexandra, the incoming one. An extraordinary debut! One can only wonder why Carr didn’t come to this art sooner. It’s where he belongs.”

Joseph Kertes