[mattkrause]

Francis Spufford's Red Plenty might fit here. It's historical fiction, set in the 1950s and 1960s USSR, and describes an attempt to build an efficient planned economy with linear programming. It's a bit like Little House on the Prairie, in that some of the people and events are fictional, but the big ideas were mostly true (there's a massive set of end-notes if you care).

I found both the math and the vignettes about life in the USSR to be fascinating.

[qubex]

Big shoutout for Red Plenty. If you (understandably) thought operation research, linear programming, and price discovery are too arcane to serve as the basis that undergirds a gripping novel, be prepared to be proven wrong.