The stories are autobiographical episodes based on the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime in Italy and afterwards. They include various themes that follow a chronological sequence: his ancestry; his study of chemistry and practising the profession in wartime Italy; a pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time,[2] and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan; his arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, and internment in the Fossoli di Carpi and Auschwitz camps; and postwar life as an industrial chemist.
Each of the twenty-one stories in the book bears the name of a chemical element as its title and has a connection to the element in some way.
The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016.[5] The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.
^In the chapter, Nickel, "...on some other of those long nights were born two stories of islands and freedom, the first I felt inclined to write after...liceo..."(1984 paperback, p. 73), and "Nor have the two mineral tales which I wrote then disappeared.... The reader will find them here in the succeeding pages, inserted, like a prisoner's dream of escape, between these tales of militant chemistry." (1984 paperback, p. 78)
^"One story fantasize[s] about a remote precursor of mine, a hunter of lead instead of nickel...." 1984 paperback, p. 73
^"...the other [story], ambiguous and mercurial, I had taken from a reference to the island of Tristan da Cunha that I happened to see during that period." 1984 paperback, p. 73