Here is a blurb for David Leavitt's new book: (David Leavitt is one of my favorite writers).
David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes.
It's hard to categorize David Leavitt. He is gay, but much of his work isn't gay. He is American, but has written a lot about England and England during World War II (The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, While England Sleeps etc.)
I fell in love with an essay he wrote in Esquire years and years ago. He is my age, and he wrote it about the group of us that fell between baby boomers and gen-X. That was when they capped baby boomers in 1956 - since then they have just moved it up to 1964 to ignore our group - which is no big deal. But he wrote about an (almost) generation that wasn't baby boomers, didn't rebel as hippies. We were the Mary Tyler Moore generation. When confounded by a problem, What Would Mary Do? It was a beautiful piece of writing.
Then I read "Lost Language of the Cranes". It is dated now, but it is a 1984 coming of age about 
a young man who is learning he is gay. But the gay isn't the point. The point is a family that can't communicate. In fact the title refers to sounds mechanical cranes make. The screech and metal tearing of the building mechanics. A language that cannot be understood or reproduced, much like the soundless language of his parents. A secret he cannot be part of. The story is probably pedestrian now - but the image of incomprehension has stayed with me for 20+ years.
a young man who is learning he is gay. But the gay isn't the point. The point is a family that can't communicate. In fact the title refers to sounds mechanical cranes make. The screech and metal tearing of the building mechanics. A language that cannot be understood or reproduced, much like the soundless language of his parents. A secret he cannot be part of. The story is probably pedestrian now - but the image of incomprehension has stayed with me for 20+ years.Anyway, read him if you get a chance.