At a dinner in Orvieto, Pope Urban IV shouts at Thomas Aquinas to pass the involtini. Whether this incident actually occurred is doubtful. Whether it matters is even less clear. And yet the delay-the dish hovering eternally between hands-refuses to end.

From this trivial, possibly apocryphal incident unfolds The Physics of Interminableness, a philosophical satire and narrative inquiry into why so many things in modern life never conclude. Across twenty meticulously digressive chapters, Otto Handley follows the involtini as it gathers unexpected mass, drawing in theologians, bureaucrats, physicists, monks, committees, crowds, forms, footnotes, and infinite feeds. Zeno's paradoxes invade the dining room. Language learns to postpone endings. Technology accelerates everything except arrival.

For readers of Beckett, Kafka, Bernhard, and institutional satire, Otto Handley offers a work that is as funny as it is exacting-a meditation on delay, attention, and the strange endurance of unfinished things.

Otto Handley was born in Spitzbergen in 1979 and later studied sociology at the University of Manchester, where his fascination with the hidden structures of everyday life first took root. Now living in Basingstoke with his wife, Amalietta, and their six children, Handley divides his time between writing, exploring caves, tending to an unruly collection of orchids, and coaxing baroque melodies from his lute. His work blends domestic observation with philosophical curiosity, reflecting a life shaped equally by the depths of speleology and the delicate discipline of horticulture.