This is such a peculiar little book, not in and of itself, but because it is the third in a trilogy dealing with great historical scientists and their world-changing discoveries, and yet Isaac Newton barely features. The narrator is writing, and has abandoned near completion, a book about the physicist, but there is only one real direct exploration of Newton, via two letters written during or as a result of a nervous breakdown, and one of those letters is fictional. Instead, we have an odd little tale of an academic historian interloper who encounters a family, does questionable things and makes questionable assumptions only to have it all turned on its head. Perhaps there is some clever narrative conceit here, and the story mirrors or is informed by Newton's various laws, but rather it seems more like a microcosm of a world that believes one set of things to be true thrown into disarray when it turns out to be completely wrong. Having such a process re-enacted in a banal, sordid little family drama is more in keeping with the rest of the trilogy, where the great cosmic insights were set against the grinding frustrations of the prosaic everyday world.