A very fine piece of 'faction', with 2 real and 2 imaginary characters it is quite the best of Pear's works (including the later Scipio). A great read.

re An instance of the fingerpost: I cannot really speak to its mathematical quality but it is an enormous pleasure to read (if crying can be accounted pleasure), and seriously well-written.

I have only given it 4 on your scale, always a slightly invidious procedure (and I spent years as as a statistician in market and social research); but I want some day to re-read it, and I suspect it would only go up rather than down.However, now I think about it, I think I tend to give novels (Watt / Our Mutual Friend / Tom Jones / Middlemarch) 4 against 5 for poetry and plays (well obviously not all of them).

Thank you for the other books on this interesting list, most of which are new to me.

It is probably supererogatory to point out that the button below this box says 'Submit Query', but I think, unless you are not a person, that you can probably tell that this isn't one. [Note: I think that the results of an HTML form may technically be considered a "query" in computer science lingo regardless of whether the words contained therein are interrogatory. -Alex]