ABOUT THE BOOK

One winter morning in 1910 a Harvard University lecture hall is crowded with America's leading professors. William Sidis is at the podium to present his theory of the Fourth Dimension. William is eleven years old.

The following day he is on the front page of every newspaper. The public can't get enough of the prodigy who could read when he was eighteen months, who taught himself Latin and Greek at age three, and who wrote books about grammar, astronomy and anatomy before his eighth birthday. Many predict he will be a second Newton, performing miracles and astonishing the world. Ten years later William makes the headlines once again-this time charged with sedition.

THE PERFECT LIFE OF WILLIAM SIDIS is a novel inspired by the mysterious fate of the remarkable genius William Sidis. Measuring between 250 and 300, his IQ was the highest ever recorded. So why has he been forgotten? What happened to him? And who was the young woman whose photograph he carried with him till the day he died?

The novel transports readers to nineteenth-century Boston and New York and into the salons of the American elite, where young William is put on display, and depicts a childhood dominated by parents who, collaborating with the leading psychologists of the day, transformed his life into a psychological experiment - an experiment that has tragic consequences for William. Until one day he realizes he must escape.

THE AUTHOR

THE PERFECT LIFE OF WILLIAM SIDIS is Morten Brask's second novel, following his critically acclaimed debut The Ocean in Theresienstadt, published in 2007. About that novel one critic wrote:"Well-written, melancholy entertaining and eminently structured. I'm reading and reading, so go away, I'm captivated!".

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