This has one of the year’s best titles and some of the year’s best cosmological concepts. Chown looks at moments before the Big Bang, the four-line formula that may contain all our universe’s complexities, whether stars are artefacts and particles just vortices in a field. At the end, he offers a conclusion to space-time that would see us all immortalised inside a cosmic computer. Prepare to go “Cor!” twice on every page.