Zenith

By Kuutti Koski

Zenith is set in the middle of the era of Enlightenment at the core of central Europe’s monarchy’s courts and their scientific academies.  Maupertuis, a French explorer and son of a pirate, returns from an expedition in the challenging conditions of Northern Finland in the Tornio River Valley where he’d been sent by Ludvig XV’s Parisian Academy of Science to measure the shape of the Earth.  When Maupertuis presents his surprising results to the academy, proofing the Earth’s mandarin shape, the French scientific community turns its back to the acknowledged scientist.  Not long after, the ‘philosopher king’ Frederick the Great invites Maupertuis to Prussia to set up his scientific academy, but success comes with a price and soon Maupertuis’ envier and wicked tongues, such as Voltaire, follow him and also denounce the era’s leading scientist as an imposter and traitor in Prussia. In the meantime, the threat of war casts a shadow over Europe.  Zenith praises the never-ending thirst for knowledge and the search for truth. With its refreshing dialogues, wicked letter exchanges and Maupertuis’ profoundly shaped character and vivacity, Zenith opens up to its readers a seemingly long past era as if its events took place only yesterday.   Koski follows in the footsteps of the masters of historical novels, such as Olli Jalonen, Umberto Eco and Daniel Kehlmann.  

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About the author

Kuutti Koski (b. 1985) is a Helsinki-based author whose origins are in northern Finland. Koski has worked as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Kehitys, specializing in global development issues and in communications at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and at the United Nations.His second novel, Zenith, set in the era of Enlightenment, plays refreshingly with facts and fiction around the French scientist Maupertuis, who travels to the Finnish Lapland to determine the (mandarin) shape of the Earth, and later becomes a collaborator of Fredrick the Great and his Science Academy in Berlin.“If you want to know what happened yesterday, read your own diary. If you want to know what will happen tomorrow, read someone else’s diary written some three hundred years ago – or a novel based on it.”– Kuutti Koski