Geeks are the in thing in literature this year, or so it seems. First there was Graeme Simsion's highly amusing The Rosie Project, about a romantic hero with undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome. And now New York writer Gabriel Roth picks up on the trend with his memorable debut, The Unknowns, a sharp, funny and often slightly disturbing insight into the male mind.
There are some big differences to The Rosie Project. The star of this novel is all guile when it comes to his relationships, hypersensitive to social cues and a chronic over-thinker.
Eric Muller doesn't want to be a geek. He loves girls just as much as computer programming. The trouble is he excels at dealing with only one of those things - and no, it isn't romance.
The novel follows Eric through two periods of his life - his hapless years of high school and his early 20s after he has become a dot.com millionaire.
We cringe when his bid to decode his female classmates goes horribly wrong and his journal of detailed observations about them falls into the wrong hands. And we cringe too at his studied attempts to hit on girls at parties when he's all grown up and successful in San Francisco. There is a lot of cringing but it's all very enjoyable.