THE UNIVERSE in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking, is the sequel to the phenomenal bestseller, A Brief History of Time.

That book has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, and features in the Guinness Book of Records as the best book which has made more appearances than any other on the Sunday Times best-seller list -- 240 weeks, with 11 weeks at number one.

One of the most influential thinkers of our time, Stephen Hawking is an intellectual icon, known not only for the adventurousness of his ideas, but for the clarity and wit with which he expresses them. His multi-million-copy bestseller, A Brief History of Time, introduced the fascinating landscape of theoretical physics to readers all over the world.

Now, in a major new, lavishly illustrated book, Hawking turns to the most important breakthroughs that have occurred in the years since the release of his acclaimed first book. He brings us to the cutting edge of theoretical physics, where truth is often stranger than fiction, and explains in layman's terms the principles that control our universe.

Like many in the international scientific community, Professor Hawking is seeking to uncover the grail of science -- the elusive Theory of Everything that lies at the heart of the cosmos. In The Universe In a Nutshell, he guides us on his search to uncover the secrets of the universe, from supergravity to supersymmetry, from quantum theory to heory, from holography to duality. In this most exciting intellectual adventure he seeks "to combine Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Richard Feynman's idea of multiple histories into one complete unified theory that will describe everything that happens in the universe." He takes us to the wild frontiers of science where superstring theory and p-branes may hold the final clue to the puzzle.

Professor Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. (Published by Bantam at £20).