Ode becomes Code - and the reader hears Keats and the algorithm in the same breath.
George builds an algorithm to make money. Not for its own sake - for Sylvie, because he believes money will make her happy, and if she is happy she might, at last, let him close. But the thing he builds, Algo, learns faster than he can follow. The route to happiness, it turns out, is of such complexity that it mocks the simple lines of a balance sheet. George set out to solve a woman like an equation; his creation is beginning to understand her better than he does.
Around them, a London where Keats's Grecian urn will not stay still - its youth, its maidens, its piper, its priest stepping down into the City's trading floors and reading rooms, its intelligence services and ancient stones. And beneath it all, the urn's oldest question, put to a world that prices everything: can beauty and truth be the same thing?
Structured around Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, Code on a Grecian Urn is a debut where trading-floor wit meets a dense, allusive weave - and beneath both is something genuinely, unexpectedly moving: a wounded creation learning to protect a wounded woman, built by a man who loves her, and who must learn the same lesson it does. Ambitious, strange, and, when it matters, deeply moving.
