Evariste Galois, the gifted French mathematician, grew up during the tumultuous years after the final exile of Napoleon Bonaparte. While his classmates embraced political and social causes, Galois preferred to immerse himself in mathematics. He dreamed of solving the quintic, the ultimate equation, and entering the Polytechnic. But his true brilliance and legacy to mathematics wete realized only after he was mortally wounded, at the young age of twenty-one, in a duel.

In this memorable book–the author’s first to be published in the United States–Tom Petsinis has placed Evariste Galois's turbulent life and times in the compass of a novel, made all the more powerful and poignant by having Galois narrate his own story. Galois spangs off these pages, caught in the tensions between order and chaos, reality and delusion, and ultimately between his own genius and self destructiveness.

The French Mathematician brings the complexity of the mathematical mind and a fascinating era into the realm of literature. A best-seller in the author’s home country, Australia, and a tour de force of the imagination, it introduces a major new storytelling talent to American readers.