Number theory - what Gauss called "the queen of mathematics", devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships - does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than 4 million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation. The book is narrated by the housekeeper of the title, a single mother employed by an agency, who is assigned a new client. He lives in a dingy two-room apartment, and his suit jacket is covered with reminder notes he scribbles to himself. This is the Professor, a brilliant mathematician who suffered brain damage in a car accident in 1975, and since then cannot remember anything for more than an hour and 20 minutes at a time. "It's as if he has a single, 80-minute videotape inside his head," the narrator explains, "and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories."...We learn about primes, triangular numbers, the invention of zero, and so on, in surprisingly warm-hearted scenes of exposition. Perhaps the Professor's most splendid speech dramatises prime-hunting as a quest through inhospitable country. At first, the prime numbers are frequent, but "When you get to much bigger numbers - a million or 10 million - you're venturing into a wasteland where the primes are terribly far apart [...] that's right, a desert. No matter how far you go, you don't find any. Just sand as far as the eye can see. The sun shines down mercilessly, your throat is parched, your eyes glaze over. Then you think you see one, a prime number at last, and you go running toward it - only to find that it's just a mirage, nothing but hot wind. Still, you refuse to give up, staggering on step by step, determined to continue the search ... until you see it at last, the oasis of another prime number, a place of rest and cool, clear water ... "

Anne Michaels's 1997 debut novel, Fugitive Pieces, was a bona fide phenomenon... From her poetry's snapshots of mid-20th-century Europe to the decimation of Warsaw in The Winter Vault, the second world war is her confirmed territory. "I think for everyone of my generation, this was the formative event," she offers. "When we were born, everyone had just come back from war, or lost someone in the war, or emigrated because of the war - it was inescapable." The Winter Vault is a rich, full book, written with the lyricism...that distinguished Fugitive Pieces, but with an overall cohesion and assurance missing from her first novel: a bigger, bolder, more confident version of her earlier work, which nevertheless retains an entrancing delicacy at the level of sentence and image. Opening in 1964 on the construction of the Aswan dam in Egypt, the book interleaves the intricate, anguished negotiations of a marriage with three separate but reverberating events: the dismantling and reconstruction of the temple at Abu Simbel, threatened by the Nile's rising waters; the building of Canada's St Lawrence Seaway; and the systematic destruction and ersatz restoration of occupied Warsaw. Once again, as in Fugitive Pieces, ideas of memory and love, possession and dispossession haunt the narrative; in The Winter Vault, however, they emerge decisively from subtext into text....The place of the individual within the larger event remains central to her work. The Winter Vault opens on the image of a young couple, Jean and Avery, aboard a boat on the Nile. Avery is one of the engineers involved in the relocation of the temple; Jean, his wife, is a botanist. As dusk deepens over Abu Simbel's "scene of ghastly devastation", Avery takes out a box of watercolours and paints, "sometimes the scene before them ... sometimes ... from memory, the Chiltern Hills", on to his wife's back. ... "- Reviewed in the Guardian