The Geometer Lobachevsky

An inventive and original Irish writer arrives at the Tuskar Rock list on a wave of prize listings and critical prestige.

'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology ...'

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'.

Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.

About the Author

Adrian Duncan is a Berlin-based Irish visual artist and fiction writer who originally trained as a structural engineer. His short fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, gorse, The Moth, The Dublin Review and Meridian (US), among other publications. His novels are Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019) and A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020), and he published a story collection Midfield Dynamo in 2021.