I know that Lewis Carroll included lots of clever tricks in his Alice in Wonderland stories, but I'd never really thought about maths or science playing any significant part in literature. This book, though, brilliantly describes all the different ways in which maths impacts the novels and poems we read, whether it's in the construction, the plot or context, or the characters themselves

In this wonderfully entertaining, often funny, book, Sarah Hart describes all the ways in which maths has influenced writers over the generations, looking thematically at how it has informed their work.

She unpicks the rhythm and rhyme of poetry and describes how Moby-Dick is full of sophisticated geometry, James Joyce’s novels are checkered with mathematical references and George Eliot was obsessed with statistics.

There is a section about the significance of numbers - why are three wishes significant, for example? And why do we have the seven dwarfs and 40 thieves? 

And she introduces us to the mathematician characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

There's so much in this book that after racing through it with delight on your first reading, you'll want to keep it to hand when you revisit your favourite authors in order to uncover the hidden depths to their work. 

I have to confess that there were some equations, graphs and calculations included that were beyond me, but I did feel that with a little application I might have a better understanding, such is Sarah Hart's clear and engaging writing.

But her overriding point is that 'maths and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe'. An amazing book!