Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC is a feverish, documentary-haunted novel about intelligence, madness, war, mathematics, machines, and the people who helped build them.

At its centre is John von Neumann: prodigy, polymath, architect of game theory, computing, nuclear strategy, and the cold, glittering logic behind the modern technological order. Around him gather physicists, generals, mathematicians, ghosts of the atomic age, and the long shadow of systems too powerful for their makers to fully understand.

Like When We Cease to Understand the World, this is fiction moving through real history with a scalpel and a migraine. Labatut writes about genius as contamination: the way abstraction becomes bomb, computer, market, military doctrine, artificial intelligence, and then, eventually, a planetary mood. 

A strong one for readers of W. G. Sebald, Tom McCarthy, Roberto Bolaño’s darker essayistic modes, history of science, AI anxiety, nuclear dread, philosophical fiction, and books where the footnotes feel like they might start setting alight.

Pushkin Press paperback edition, first published in 2023, with full number line. Good second-hand condition, with light handling and shelfwear.