A Brief History of Time

Scientist Stephen Hawking writes for general readers about the largest questions in cosmology: how the universe began and what made that start possible, whether time always runs forward, whether the universe has boundaries, and whether space has other dimensions. Along the way he explains black holes, quarks and antimatter, the arrows of time and the big bang, and he reviews older theories of the cosmos as well as current ones. The book has been translated into thirty languages and has sold more than ten million copies. A later edition notes how far observation of the very large and the very small has advanced since first publication.

Richard Branson put it on his list of 65 books to read in a lifetime, and James Clear includes it among his best nonfiction books. Mark Manson, naming it among the best books on science, called it a lovely plain-language account of the Big Bang, astrophysics and the theories behind the universe.