In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s fables, an ancient empire becomes so fixated on the science of carto-graphy that eventually the only map that will suffice is one whose size matches that of the realm itself. “The vast map was useless,” Borges writes, laconically. In its drive to capture reality, even to beat it, the empire loses all sense of it.

So it is too in the fantastical tale of Sam Israel III: a modern hedge fund fable of fraud and failure that starts in the familiar territory of Wall Street grime and crime, and the drive of one man to beat the market – to “hear” it, as Israel puts it – and ends deep in the weeds of conspiracy and paranoia.

Truth be told, the collapse of Israel’s hedge fund, Bayou Capital, in 2008, would have been condemned to obscurity by the dark, long sha-dow of the vaster Madoff scam were it not for its sheer strangeness, as told by Guy Lawson. In Octopus, which was long-listed for this year’s Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, Lawson relates by far the most rollicking, trippy yarn to emerge from the 2008 fin-ancial collapse so far.