'Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?' remains the most curious and most enduring of allmetaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated essayist Jim Holt now enters this fascinating debate with his lively and deeply informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe.With sly humour and a highly original personal approach, Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective. Suggesting that we might have been too reductive in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang, he tracks down, among others, an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Nobel Laureate physicist and John Updike just before he died, to pursue this cosmic puzzle from every angle. As he pieces together a solution - while offering useful insights into time, consciousness, and eternity - he sheds fascinating new light on the meaning of existence.'Why Does The World Exist? is more fun than a book this serious has any right to be. Holt has written a metaphysical page-turner and a triumph of intellectual liveliness.'Rebecca Goldstein, author of36 Arguments For the Existence of God.