The Bender of Time

A black self-driving taxi. A boy who calculates faster than any computer. A journey that begins where history breaks in two. Samir, a fourteen-year-old math prodigy, discovers that a seemingly ordinary autonomous taxi hides a quantum engine able to bend space-time. Its name is Chronos - and it has chosen him. Together with Edward Vance, the enigmatic physicist who built the machine, and Katrin Weber - Nyx - a former Cold War elite agent, Samir will race through the epochs: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the swinging Rome of 1962, down to the depths of a Congolese mine where time itself is about to snap. But every jump leaves a wound. And in the present, the CNRS - led by the ruthless Étienne Vaurin - is closing in on the only machine that can still change the shape of the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francesca Ciardi is an actress, performer, and author with a deeply cosmopolitan artistic journey. Trained in classical acting and diction, she made her mark on international cinema in the 1980s with cult roles - including the female lead in Ruggero Deodato's celebrated Cannibal Holocaust and dramatic parts in auteur works such as Mauro Bolognini's Mosca Addio - as well as working in numerous RAI theater and television productions. Her career is marked by an unceasing search for independence and experimentation that has led her to live and work between Italy, France, and England, moving from dramatic art to entrepreneurship, and on to the exploration of contemporary narrative languages. Both lucid and ironic, yet visionary in her gaze on reality, she unites a sensitivity to the written word with a rare knowledge of the mechanisms of dramaturgy and scenic rhythm. The Bender of Time is her debut novel, in which a surreal touch and the depth of human inquiry fuse into an original and disorienting narrative universe.