Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond

Cosmologist Mersini-Houghton (Cosmic Update) melds memoir and scientific discovery in this mixed bag of a survey. Growing up in Albania when the country was under a totalitarian government, Mersini-Houghton developed a love of space, as “the only place that was open to us was the... stars above. The state could not prevent us from looking up.” She eventually left the country after winning a scholarship to the University of Maryland. Alongside the stirring personal narrative, the author lays out her theory of the universe, which, she writes, changes “how we conceive of our world and our place in it.” She’s on shakier ground here: her “quantum landscape multiverse” theory, she posits, disproves the notion that there’s just one universe and offers a look at what happened before the big bang. While she calls the theory a game changer, the science behind it is often imprecise or unclear (“I had missed a crucial piece of the puzzle: the separation or decoupling of the different entangled branches of the wave function of the universe”). This one’s worth it for the hard-won personal success story, but the theory end of things doesn’t quite land. Agent: Peter Bernstein, Bernstein Literary Agency. (July)

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated this was the author's first book.