It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table

Summary

An extraordinary kind of autobiography in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and its starting-point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, science and personal record, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as an industrial chemist and the terrible years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition. Yet this exquisitely lucid text is also humourous and even witty in a way possible only to one who has looked into the abyss.

About the author

Primo Levi

Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more