....I am a child again, running happily toward Mother, eager to tell her that I have learnt to count backwards to zero. The French mathematician is Evariste Galois, brilliant and tragic, whose work was dismissed by his contemporaries. A ferventRepublican in post-Revolutionary France, Galois was imprisoned at the age of twenty and died a year later in a mysterious early-morning duel. A quasi-autobiographical novel recreating Galois' world which will be enjoyed by anyone who savoured the intellectual drama of FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM.