The facts are these: When Albert Einstein was a young man, his wife-to-be gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, whom they soon gave up for adoption to a Hungarian woman. Beyond that, Lieserl Einstein is lost to history.

But not to literature. Anna McGrail has imagined an amazing yet plausible life for this indomitable woman, one that spans the scientific history of the modern world from the theory of relativity to the atomic bomb, and that moves from the plains of rural Hungary to the death camps of Germany to the laboratory at Los Alamos, where the entire world was put under threat of annihilation.

It is Lieserl's sole burning desire to learn physics, to beat her father at his own game, to teach him that actions - whether giving away a daughter or unlocking the secrets of the universe - have consequences that cannot be denied.