A Brainzie Book

Rare Things Happen Often

A story about two sisters, one stone, and how chance and a very long time made us and everything around us.

Stella is eleven, four weeks into boarding school, and counting the days on the back page of her planner. Then, on a Friday night, a fireball crosses the sky, breaks into pieces, and is gone.

By Saturday morning her sister Ada has gone too, leaving a notebook under Stella's pillow and one instruction: read it in order. The notebook is the thing Ada has been writing all year, the story of how atoms, chance and a very long time made us and everything around us, and the place she has gone is hidden inside it, in pieces, where only somebody who has read it properly will find them.

The rain arrives at two.

Start reading

For readers of about eleven and up. 23 chapters · about 84,000 words · roughly 6.5 hours of reading.

Chapters 1–4 are free to read. The rest is £4.99 (launch offer: £1.00 for the first 50 readers). Buy it

An electron, an atom, a molecule, a virus, a cell and a dinosaur, each drawn at its own scale. From the atom to the dinosaur is a factor of about 250 billion. The electron has no size that any experiment has yet been able to measure. The virus, the cell and the dinosaur are all built from atoms by the same chemistry, read from the same genetic code. (Whether a virus counts as alive is argued about: it can only be copied inside a living cell, by that cell's machinery.)

Ada's notebook

The thirteen entries of the notebook Stella finds under her pillow, if you want to go back to one.

Rare Things Happen Often

Contents

Ada's notebook