The Last Samurai

Set in a small London flat, Helen DeWitt's first novel follows Sibylla, an American single mother working as a freelance typist, and her son Ludo, a prodigy who reads Homer in the original Greek and goes on to Hebrew, Old Norse, Japanese, Inuit and advanced mathematics. In place of a father, Sibylla plays him Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai until he knows it by heart. Ludo wants the one thing she will not tell him, his father's name. After years out of print, the novel was reissued, and in 2024 The New York Times placed it 29th on its list of the century's 100 best books.

Connect Ventures founder Bill Earner named it among his favorite novels in an interview about his reading.