Frances Montrose’s mother was a housewife and a secret mathematician. Frances too, though an English teacher, has a gift for mathematics. She enters a competition to present a paper at a conference in Athens-and wins. However, she’s not what the organisers expected-and the conference is not what Frances expected either. She disappears for four days. Frances’s story is told by her daughter, Hypatia, who uses her mother’s voice, and draws on her mother’s diaries in this bestselling, award-winning novel of mothers, maths, love and betrayal.

First published in 1996, Leaning Towards Infinity was immediately lauded by critics and won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Best Book in the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the South East Asia and South Pacific Region, and was shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Awards as well as the US Tip Tree Prize.