The Indian Clerk »

David Leavitt is the author of several novels, including The Body of Jonah Boyd, While England Sleeps, and Equal Affections. A recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“Richly imagined [and] impressive” (New York Times Book Review), this critically acclaimed and emotionally charged novel about the strange and ultimately tragic relationship between an esteemed British mathematician and an unknown—and unschooled—mathematical genius is historical fiction at its best: ambitious, profound, and absorbing.

Based on the remarkable true story of G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, and populated with such luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk takes this extraordinary slice of history and transforms it into an emotional and spellbinding story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world. A literary masterpiece, it appeared on four bestseller lists, including the Los Angeles Times, and received dazzling reviews from every major publication in the country.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The standards used to assess a new work of fiction's success -- pacing, immediacy of characterization, shapeliness of plot -- often avoid the deeper character of the novel at hand, to say nothing of the pleasures peculiar to the novel form: chief among them is the immersion in a world of apprehensions, personalities, and shifting realities as the reader wanders, acquiring intelligence -- or merely things to ponder -- along the way. A novel doesn't always have to compel attention to reward it; that's one of the differences between literature and the movies. David Leavitt's eighth novel offers such distinctive novelistic rewards. The stage for its exploration of ideas, sexual identity, and class distinctions is set in January 1913, when mathematician and Cambridge don G. H. Hardy receives a curious letter from one S. Ramanujan, an obscure Indian clerk who will turn out to be one of the great mathematical thinkers of the era (in outline, the core of Leavitt's tale is true). As famous figures (Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence), momentous events (World War I), and deftly described mathematical ideas are woven into the melancholy tale of Ramanujan's astonishing Cambridge sojourn and Hardy's perplexed emotional life, the reader is transported -- courtesy of Leavitt's evocative prose -- to a plane of perception suffused with slowly unfolding satisfactions. --James Mustich