Like many fifteen-year-old British school children, Christopher Boone wants to take his A-level Mathematics exam and start his journey towards a University education. His math skills are prodigious, and he shows similar aptitude in Physics and other computation-heavy sciences.

Unlike nearly all those other students, however, Christopher is autistic. When overwhelmed or put in disagreeable situations, he is prone to fits of screaming or groaning. To feel safe in public, he’ll keep his hand on an open pocket knife, an indicator of his willingness to use violence when faced with difficulty: “The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet. I didn’t like him touching me like this. And this is when I hit him.”

Although rigorously logical in most ways, he is also openly superstitious. Seeing a line of yellow cars on the road will lead him to conclude that it will be “a Black Day, which is a day when I don’t speak to anyone and sit reading my own books and don’t eat my lunch and Take No Risks.”

Christopher’s narrative begins with him discovering a dead dog on a neighbor’s lawn. He decides to investigate who would have killed an otherwise friendly dog with a lawn fork. His investigation leads him to speak for the first time to several neighbors and learn things that stress and reshape his life. The narrative is brisk, and Christopher’s insights on the people and situations he encounters are quirky, amusing (albeit unintenionally, from his point of view), and often spot-on.

The narration is done in the first person, and Haddon is amazing in the way he brings life to Christopher and, through him, to those closest to him. With sympathy but no false rationalizations, Haddon details the sense Christopher does and doesn’t make of the world. There is a lot of naiveté in his worldview, but a fair share of scheming as well. He feels safety and fear, attraction and repulsion—in ways easily understood to most readers—but there is a core selfishness that cannot be put aside. Perhaps that is one of Haddon’s most remarkable achievements: creating a sympathetic, likeable character, for whom human relationships are so difficult.