At the Adelaide Writers' Festival, celebrated novelist Ian McEwan noted on ABC Radio's Conversation Hour that Alan Turing might well have received a Nobel Prize had he lived. Almost certainly: Turing is widely regarded as the father of the modern computer, and can reasonably be said to have shortened World War II in Europe by perhaps a year. But for the heavy-handedness of the British government in identifying the mathematician's homosexuality as the possible cause of a security risk – the miserable consequence being Turing's untimely death – his formidable contribution to computer science would no doubt have made a deep impression on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

As McEwan's remark illustrates, Turing is still at the forefront of popular intellectual thinking. His incandescent career resulted in numerous books that seek to celebrate his work. Novelist and lecturer David Leavitt's portrait is the most recent. He portrays Turing as a critically flawed person, who seems aware from an early age that he is destined to be an outsider – though the sheer weight of his accomplishments assured that he could not go completely unrewarded.

It's all here: Turing's work on the Bombes that led to the cracking of the Nazis' Enigma code, his pioneering work on more sophisticated cryptanalysis machines and finally his time at Manchester University in the early 1950s where he worked on methods of advanced computation – and the possibility of artificial intelligence.

Leavitt mines deep into the seam of Turing anecdote, including some lively exchanges at Cambridge between Turing and the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Leavitt's biography might not have the magisterial qualities of Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage, 1992) but sacrifices the maths for a simpler read. If you are prepared to work through 30 pages of increasingly complex encoding in the chapter about Turing Machines, David Leavitt's interpretation of Alan Turing is well worth reading.