Rakel has a rare talent for math, but she has never mastered the art of making friends. At nineteen, she moves to Oslo to attend university, and meets Jakob, a brilliant, older teacher. He is also working on a novel about Sofja Kovalevskaja, the first woman who became a professor in Mathematics. Just as Kovalevskaja was very close to her much older advisor, Rakel and Jakob are instantly drawn to each other and eventually become lovers, although he is already married. In the years to come, Rakel's academic career soars, but her health declines, and from her bedside she spends hours imagining the life of Sofja while trying to understand her own. With a gaze both naive and mercilessly sharp, she dissects what may be her life's only love story, looking for patterns and answers in numbers, music and literature. An extraordinarily beautiful, heartbreaking, and moving novel about finding meaning and connections when you need it the most