"Audin plays with codes, numbers and dates to create a fascinating and unsettling story."—Le Temps This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter—at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary—locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience. Michèle Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father's torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers.

One Hundred and Twenty-Six Days throws you onto the path of one family's unthinkable journey as their 27-year-old is violently hurled onto the cancer battlefield. What is to come was nothing anyone could ever imagine.

"One of the best novelists since Jane Austen....The Hundred Days may be the best installment yet....I give O'Brian's fans joy of it."—Philadelphia Inquirer Napoleon, escaped from Elba, pursues his enemies across Europe like a vengeful phoenix. If he can corner the British and Prussians before their Russian and Austrian allies arrive, his genius will lead the French armies to triumph at Waterloo. In the Balkans, preparing a thrust northwards into Central Europe to block the Russians and Austrians, a horde of Muslim mercenaries is gathering. They are inclined toward Napoleon because of his conversion to Islam during the Egyptian campaign, but they will not move without a shipment of gold ingots from Sheik Ibn Hazm which, according to British intelligence, is on its way via camel caravan to the coast of North Africa. It is this gold that Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin must at all costs intercept. The fate of Europe hinges on their desperate mission. "The Hundred Days is certain to delight O'Brian's fans, for whom happiness is an unending stream of Aubrey/Maturin books....[It] is a fine novel that stands proudly on the shelf with the others."—Los Angeles Times

Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica—an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates. Roth’s signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. “There may be,” as James Wood has stated, “no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.”

So writes David Biro, a young doctor who had everything going for him -- a beautiful wife, a successful medical practice, and the Ph.D. in literature he had always dreamed of -- when he was diagnosed, at thirty-one, with a rare blood disease. Of the two possible treatments, he chose the riskier one, a bone marrow transplant. As he charts his journey from doctor to patient, from professor of dermatology to high-ranking medical "zebra, " Biro brings clarity to one of the most medically complex procedures of our time. And in writing about his own fears, Biro taps into the anxieties we all feel when confronted with a medical world that though more technologically advanced than ever strikes us, at times, as confusing -- with its contradictory diagnoses -- and compassionless.Combining the self-analysis of Oliver Sack's in A Leg to Stand On with the emotional impact of Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, "One Hundred Days" is more than a physician's triumphant account of his own illness, it is a searing and, ultimately, hopeful meditation on illness and mortality, fate and the fellowship of family.