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Bloomsbury Publishing
September 2007
On Sale: September 4, 2007
496 pages
ISBN: 1596910402
EAN: 9781596910409
Hardcover
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Fiction
The brilliant new novel from one of our most respected
writers—his most ambitious and accessible to date.
On a January morning in 1913, G. H. Hardy—eccentric,
charismatic and, at thirty-seven, already considered the
greatest British mathematician of his age—receives in the
mail a mysterious envelope covered with Indian stamps.
Inside he finds a rambling letter from a self-professed
mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of
solving the most important unsolved mathematical problem of
all time. Some of his Cambridge colleagues dismiss the
letter as a hoax, but Hardy becomes convinced that the
Indian clerk who has written it—Srinivasa Ramanujan—
deserves to be taken seriously. Aided by his collaborator,
Littlewood, and a young don named Neville who is about to
depart for Madras with his wife, Alice, he determines to
learn more about the mysterious Ramanujan and, if possible,
persuade him to come to Cambridge. It is a decision that
will profoundly affect not only his own life, and that of
his friends, but the entire history of mathematics. Based on the remarkable true story of the strange and
ultimately tragic relationship between an esteemed British
mathematician and an unknown—and unschooled—mathematical
genius, 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 spell-binding story
about the fragility of human connection and our need to
find order in the world.
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