In 2008, Paolo Giordano, an Italian physicist in his mid-20s, published his first novel. Called “The Solitude of Prime Numbers,” it won Italy’s most coveted book prize, the Premio Strega. Because Italy does not have a robust reading culture, the fact that this literary debut has sold more than a million copies there hints both at the extraordinary magnetism of Giordano’s voice and at the human interest lurking behind the left-brain mathiness of his title. (His being a blue-eyed, sandy-haired bel ragazzo probably didn’t hurt, either.)
