The Invention of Everything Else: Library Edition

"An engaging portrait...and a poignant one of Tesla...There’s much food for thought here and some very beautiful prose." Kirkus Reviews

“Hunt (The Seas) delivers a breathtaking novel that is both difficult to classify and impossible to ignore." Library Journal

"Oddly charming and pleasantly peculiar, Hunt’s novel offers a unique perspective on hope and imagining life’s possibilities." Booklist, ALA

“Inspires both awe and envy...Hunt seems to achieve this blend effortlessly...making it more remarkable still with her own offbeat sensibility." Bookpage

"A New York City chambermaid sparks a friendship with oddball inventor Nikola Tesla in Samantha Hunt's dazzling novel." Vanity Fair

"Sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote...It all adds up to a precocious math of human marvel." Elle

"Former real-life scientist Nikola Tesla befriends a fictional hotel chambermaid in Samantha Hunt's ingenious work of historical fiction." Marie Claire

"Hunt's magical new novel is a love letter to one of the world's most remarkable inventors...For a moment...everything seems possible." The Washington Post

“[Hunt] puts her considerable talents to work...Tesla's story...is crafted with an intensity...that makes the heart beat faster.” Los Angeles Times

"Full of vivid imagery, sounds, memories...this novel is a sweet story of just how normal it is to be different." Boston Globe

“Hunt's history-steeped tale...reminds us that science necessitates creativity, which also, of course, is the essence of literature." The San Francisco Chronicle

"In her vivid reimagining...Hunt pursues the links between science and creativity and storytelling and invention to their logical extreme.” New York Magazine

“Glorious...pages of prose: daring and delicious, perfectly calibrated, fresh but not raw, original but neither off-putting nor disconcertingly strange." The Chicago Tribune

“[INVENTION is] a smart, colorful novel about aspiration and wish fulfillment in a world...engineers can’t control." - The Believer

"Hunt's fascination with language is unmistakable, resulting in beautiful, intimate observations . . . elegant, inspired." The Village Voice

"Marvelous...one wishes these scenes would never end...[it] takes its readers back to a kindler, gentler New York.” - LA Weekly

"Hunt weaves the stranger-than-fiction facts...into an engaging novel...that crackles with the possibility and promise of scientific innovation." - Seed

"An electrified, magnetized concoction that pleases, teases and dazzles...takeoff soaring with her, you will not be disappointed..." - The Oregonian

”The author is rapturous, vividly in love with her subjects and her characters." - New York Observer

"[Hunt’s] novel might be 2008's 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics'...soulful and scientific at the same time." - Velocity Weekly

“Hunt weaves history and imagination to create a seductively original world...” -- Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment

“A highwire performance by a soulful and wildly intelligent writer.” -- Rene Steinke, author of the NBA-nominated Holy Skirts

“You hold in your hands an important, fun, educational, magic read." -- Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

'A beguiling mix of love, death, pigeons and time travel, it's a gem of a story about the power of imagination' Marie Claire

Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant - and most neglected - inventors of the twentieth century.

The Invention of Everything Else charts the relationship of the girl and the genius during the last week of Tesla's life, when sinister forces are closing in on him. However, as well as being an engaging literary mystery, this exceptional novel movingly tells the life story of this extraordinary man and also recounts the heartbreak and redemption of one ordinary family..

'Samantha Hunt is an exciting find - a fresh original voice...a fantastical love story...literary gold... It should appeal to fans of The Time Traveller's Wife and Donna Tartt' Sunday Express

'Intelligent, compassionate...beautifully conjured' Daily Telegraph

'Weird and wonderful debut novel' Red

'Remarkable...Hunt wears her historical and scientific learning lightly' Financial Times

'An ambitious conflation of fact and fiction' New Scientist

'Samantha Hunt's fantasy comes closer than any biography to solving the riddle of Tesla's commercial and personal failings ... The Invention of Everything Else is perfect for nights spent in the wrong hotel, once your travel plans have, as usual, gone subtly awry' Literary Review