A DOUBTER’S ALMANAC by Ethan Canin (Bloomsbury £18.99)

AS A CHILD, Milo Andret spends all his free time alone in the woodland behind his Michigan home, obsessively carving an elaborate chain from a single piece of wood. At school he has no real friends and stands out as a maths prodigy.

Moving on to university at Berkeley he’s recognised as a genius and eventually ends up on the faculty of probably the best maths department in the world at Princeton University. There he spends years working on a problem whose solution earns him the Fields Medal, the maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

In the process, though, he discovers more than a maths proof.

He finds women are drawn to his brilliance and develops a taste for alcohol that gradually becomes a dependence, one that along with his difficult tetchy manner leads him into all kinds of trouble, trying the patience of his often envious peers and finally proving his downfall.

Despite its doorstop size and perhaps forbidding subject, Ethan Canin’s novel, split into two — the upward curve of Milo’s quest for mathematical gold and the downward slope of his dissipation of his talent — is immensely readable and, in the creation of Milo, a masterpiece. Who would have thought maths could be so gripping?