The Sand-Reckoner, Paperback

The Sand-Reckoner from author Gillian Bradshaw is a historical account that reimagines the life of one of ancient Greek's greatest minds.

The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy's Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world's greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans.

Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn't as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal-none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics.

Gillian Bradshaw won the Hopwood Prize for fiction with her first novel, Hawk of May. She has BAs in English and Classical Greek, and sold her first novel while preparing for exams for her third degree, in Greek in Latin Literature. Her novels include Cleopatra's Heir, Render Unto Caesar, The Sand-Reckoner, and The Wolf Hunt. She and her husband live in Coventry in England. They have four children and a dog.