At first glance, The Theory of Sorrow appears to be a biographical novel about Mileva Marić Einstein, the wife of the famous physicist, known for helping her husband with mathematical calculations and developing the theory of relativity, and for being the only woman of her time to study at the Zurich Polytechnic. Reading the novel, it quickly becomes clear that the work is about more than just that; it tells the story of the grief of an abandoned woman who also suffered a personal tragedy at the outbreak of World War I. And just as the world did not fully recover for several decades after the Great War, Mileva Einstein – after the death of her daughter, her separation from her husband, poverty, her son’s mental illness, and her own illness – never recovered.