Forty-nine stories, seven on each of seven themes In Seven Squared you will find tales about a short-sighted alchemist, a distraught Russian grandmother, a girl who was jealous of Princess Diana, a modern enactment of a Greek myth, and a Norse one, a little lad who took language too literally, a not-quite war widow-and forty-two more. Why seven? Seven is an awkward number, a prime that refuses to factor usefully into two or three, makes a multiplication table without a discernible pattern and it's not much use for mental arithmetic when you've ten fingers. Yet, perhaps emerging from observations of nature, it has had, over long ages, a sort of magical connotation that became interwoven with mythology and religion, philosophy and education, to such an extent that patterns of seven were widely sought or invented. So we have seven days of the week, seven ages of man, seven sins, and much more. Maybe its special power is not completely dispersed by rationality.