The Last Samurai
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.
Halfway through, DeWitt swaps Sibylla's electric voice for Ludo's quest, a string of candidate-father episodes that repeat one structure with diminishing returns. Pages of untranslated Greek and typographic play test how much homework you will do for a novel. Brilliance, here, is sometimes indistinguishable from showing off.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
