The Indian Clerk, David Leavitt, Bloomsbury, £7.99
As a young don at Trinity College, Cambridge, leading mathematician GH Hardy received a letter from Srinivasa Ramanujan – a poor, self-taught mathematician living in Madras – claiming in nine pages of equations on cheap stationery he had "improved on prime number theorem", and requesting help with publication. Hardy promoted his case with the university authorities and until 1919 he and Ramanujan were ensconced in rooms working on the Riemann hypothesis. Hardy was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret society whose membership included Bertrand Russell, GE Moore, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. In this fictionalised account there are many cameos, including from DH Lawrence – who fails to discern Hardy was gay. Leavitt portrays Hardy as sympathetic, cowardly and profoundly insecure. Scholars who are excited by pure mathematics as the first World War rages might seem an unlikely subject for enthralling fiction but, except for a few longueurs, The Indian Clerkenthrals.
Kate Bateman
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or, The Murder at Road Hill House
Kate Summerscale. Bloomsbury, £7.99
It's a classic English country-house whodunnit: an elegant detached mansion in Wiltshire; a sleeping – and eminently respectable – Victorian family; locked doors and windows; a grisly murder at the dead of night. The killing of three-year-old Saville Kent in the summer of 1860 was, however, all too real. Kate Summerscale recreates the case in a kind of overheated sepia, subjecting each apparently innocuous detail to the ghastly luminescence of a photographic flash as she pokes about in the murkiest recesses of the Victorian world. She uncovers some unpalatable truths about middle-class family values, examines the origins of the real-life plain-clothes detective, scrutinises the relationship between crime and public outrage, and produces an extended essay on the nature and function of the literary murder mystery – all without slackening the pace of her narrative for a second. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which won last year's BBC 4 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, is as gripping as a crime novel, but far, far creepier. Read it and shiver.
Arminta Wallace
Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death
Gyles Brandreth, John Murray, £7.99
This is the second in a series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as a detective. The year is 1892 and Wilde is the darling of London high society following the success of Lady Windermere's Fan. At a dinner party with friends, including Arthur Conan Doyle and poet Robert Sherard (the narrator), he invents a game called "murder" in which the guests write down the name of the person they would kill first, if they knew they would get away with it. The following day, the people named begin to die in mysterious circumstances. Wilde, Conan Doyle and Sherard investigate the deaths and, with Wilde himself on the list of possible victims, the pressure is on. Brandreth's knowledge of fin-de-siècle London, of the social and political history of the period and, above all, of Wilde himself is most impressive. Wildean witticisms abound; for example, when someone tells Oscar he has written a play about him, Wilde replies: "How clever of you, to give the public what they want."
Brian Maye
My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro
Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, Harper Perennial, £9.99
Jeffrey Eugenides has come up with a book that captures the underbelly of love: the desire, the power, the obsession and the pain. In his introduction, Eugenides , the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex,explains his title choice and how he differentiates between love and a love story: "read these stories . . . to experience its many variegated and compensatory pleasures". He offers this book as a cure for lovesickness, an antidote to adultery, to be read in the safety of your single bed. Let everyone else suffer. This beautiful collection of hand-picked classics provides a fluid read, with time to catch your breath between each offering. Chekhov, Faulkner and Nabokov feature alongside new talent and this is perfect for anyone seeking a deeper meaning to "the love story".
Briege McAtee
Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood
Mark Harris, Canongate, £8.99
Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris chronicles how five very disparate Hollywood movies went from being a twinkle in their writers’ eyes to bagging a best picture nomination at the 1967 Academy Awards. On Harris’s account, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate heralded the kind of epochal break for popular film that was represented in music by Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Alongside this changing of the artistic guard, Harris explores the political resonance of Sidney Poitier’s roles in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. Which leaves only the hilarious, humongous anachronism that was Doctor Dolittle, starring the hired, fired, re-hired Rex Harrison.
The depth and scope of Harris’s research, coupled with his nose for a good anecdote, bring to life the book’s dramatis personae of visionary egomaniacs and Machiavellian rainmakers. If you can get to the last page without having rented all five DVDs, I’d like to know how.
Daragh Downes