Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948, and was educated at Princeton and the California Institute of Technology. He has written for Granta, Harper's, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. His highly acclaimed novel GOOD BENITO, about the clash between the absolutes of science and the vagaries of human experience, is also availiable from Sceptre. He is now professor of science and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.