The Invention of Everything Else
By Samantha Hunt
Harvill Secker £12.99, 368 pages

In 1899, a commissioner in the US Patent Office declared that “everything that can be invented has been invented.” Samantha Hunt has chosen this remark as the epigraph for her remarkable new novel. Its central character is Nikola Tesla, the inventor of radio and creator of AC electricity, whose career was a spectacular disproof of that prediction.