Beans in their prime

Is it a novel, a biography or a textbook? Toying with the boundaries of all
three, Apostolos Doxiadis’s entrancing Uncle Petros and Golbach’s
Conjecture mixes real maths and mathematicians with a fictional professor
who wastes his life shuffling beans in an attempt to prove that every even
number is the sum of two primes. It’s funny, sad and even teaches you a bit of
number theory. And if you do solve Golbach’s conjecture, you may win a million
pounds. Published by Faber & Faber, £9.99, ISBN 0571202039.