A single mother teaches her prodigy son ancient Greek, Japanese, and Inuit while they watch Kurosawa's Seven Samurai on repeat in an unheated London flat. DeWitt published it in 2000 and it became a cult classic almost immediately. The novel is about genius, motherhood, and the search for a father, written in a polylingual, typographically inventive style that no one has successfully imitated.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.