Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Forbidden Symmetry: 137.5°

Forbidden Symmetry: 137.5°

Paperback

Mystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN13: 9798194918850
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 27 2026
Pages: 280
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.63 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Eleven notebooks arrived. The seventh was taken. None of them contains a single word.

Dr Mitra Farr photographs viruses for a living, and is learning, badly, the language her father can no longer speak. Then her estranged supervisor dies in Istanbul, and a crate reaches Leiden with its seal cut: eleven notebooks of pure geometry, five worn wooden tiles, and no explanation.

What she reconstructs is not a theory. It is a chain.

A tiler in Isfahan who signs a derivation he knows to be false. A physician in Cairo who cuts a page out of his own book with a knife. A widow in Nuremberg who keeps four years of observations in a ledger with the wrong dates on the cover. A crystallographer in Göttingen who scrapes her own handwriting off nineteen sheets in 1938, so that a five-year-old can carry them through a border.

Five countries. A thousand years. No contact between any of them.

Each found the same impossible fivefold order. Each, working alone, in a single afternoon, calculated what saying so would cost - and buried it.

Mitra is the first of them who can prove it. She is not the first to be right. She is only the first to be checkable, and being checkable is not an achievement. It is a delivery date.

Forbidden Symmetry is a novel about what a person does with a true thing they cannot prove, and about a daughter learning, one Tuesday at a time, what her father is still trying to tell her.

The tilework is real. The meteorite older than the Earth's crust is real. The Nobel Prize awarded for an impossibility is real. Everything in this novel that can be checked is true, and what was invented is set out at the end.

And after finishing the book, its author found, in a gallery in New Haven, a twelfth-century panel of inlaid geometry cut into the back of a Roman tombstone - made by a family who handed the craft down four generations and wrote none of it down. He had invented something very like it. He is still thinking about that.

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