The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

Christopher Edge's The Many Worlds of Albie Bright is a moving science adventure for 10 year olds about a boy who sets out to find his mum in another universe.

What happens

Albie's mum died two weeks ago. The book opens with her funeral. The vicar says she's in heaven, and Albie wants to know how he can be so sure.

His dad is a TV scientist, known as The Man Who Can Explain Everything. When Albie asks him about heaven, he explains parallel universes instead. Somewhere out there, he says, is a world where Mum never got cancer.

He means it as comfort. Albie takes it as a plan.

Both his parents are physicists. Mum's work took her deep into the old pit at the edge of the moors and to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. So Albie digs out her special laptop, her Geiger counter, a cardboard box and the banana from his packed lunch. Bananas are a tiny bit radioactive, you see!

What happens if he climbs into the box? That's the big question, and it's a brilliant one to find out with him.

Albie explains the science as he goes. Atoms, black holes and poor old Schrödinger's cat. It's chatty and often funny, so a curious reader picks up a surprising amount of physics without noticing.

There's lots of everyday school life too. Victoria Barnes calls him lamebrain. His friend Kiran wants to send Buzz Lightyear into space on My Little Pony balloons. Their teacher's left eye twitches when Class Six gets too loud.

This is a book about grief, though, and it doesn't hide from it. Albie watched his mum lose her hair and her hope. He's cross with his dad for always working. He even admits that sometimes he wishes it had been Dad who died. That's hard to read, and very honest.

For a child who has lost someone, it might be painful, so it's one to read alongside them if you can. For a reader who loves big questions about the universe, it's funny, hopeful and very clever.

What to read next

If they're after another brainy kid in a world that won't behave, try The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, where a ten-year-old genius wakes up on her birthday to a completely empty house.