Tom Harrits, "Fibonacci"

Elegant, thoughtful, and profound. For readers who enjoy vividly researched and deeply reflective historical fiction about the cost of changing the world for all time.

Leonardo Bonacci–Leo–struggles under the weight of his questions and has no idea what to choose. Should he go? Leave his childhood home of Pisa and join his father to live and work on the other side of the world, split from the rest of his family? What if it wouldn’t be safe? Should he stay? When everything at home has come to feel so empty? Yet these are his options, splintering before him. How cruel to leave it to him to decide. What if he chooses wrong?

Fibonacci tells the groundbreaking story of how this young merchant’s son journeys across continents to find his life’s purpose—and irreversibly changes the world in the process. As he learns the new reality before him, he comes upon a discovery, learned from the very people he was told were his “enemy,” that will lay the foundation for modern math, science, technology, and business as we know it. A new language that will unite humanity through the centuries that follow: the figures 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and most confounding of all, a new mark his world had never known before, the 0.

Few people today know the story of Leonardo Bonacci, the namesake behind the famed Fibonacci sequence, even though none of our lives would function as they do without him. For he brought the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to the West, a system that has revolutionized the world. This novel breaks nearly one thousand years of silence to reintroduce the man who, before he was lost to time, altered everything.