What is the title of Stephen Hawking's best-selling book?

Stephen Hawking's best-selling book was A Brief History of Time. First published in 1988, its full subtitle was From the Big Bang to Black Holes.

The popular-science book explains subjects including the origin and fate of the universe, space and time, black holes, quantum mechanics and general relativity. Hawking aimed to make difficult cosmological ideas accessible to non-specialist readers, which helped the book reach a huge international audience.

The manuscript went through extensive editing with Bantam Books editor Peter Guzzardi. Hawking was famously warned that each equation might reduce the readership, so the published edition contains only one equation: E = mc². The book became a major bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages.

Readers sometimes confuse it with The Universe in a Nutshell, published in 2001, or A Briefer History of Time, a later update written with Leonard Mlodinow. Neither is the title of Hawking's original breakthrough bestseller.