A Hundred Million Years and a Day

Summer

I will, inevitably, forget many things, perhaps even my own name. But I will never forget my first fossil. It was a trilobite, a small marine arthropod that was peacefully minding its own business until one spring day when its existence intersected with mine. A second later, we were friends for life.

Years after this, when I was old enough to understand, the trilobite would tell me that it had survived several mass extinctions. Lava and acid, a lack of oxygen, the falling sky. And then one day it must have surrendered, recognising that its time was up, and rolled into a ball, deep within a rock. It had to accept defeat, to make way for others.

Such as me: a Homo sapiens in trousers that were too big for him, standing in the tall grass of a still-young century. I had been sent home from school, that morning in 1908, for telling my teacher she was wrong. Pépin was not the name of a king of France, as she claimed. It was the name of a dog, my dog, a blue merle Australian shepherd that we'd found in the barn. He protected us from evil spirits and stray cats - often the same thing, as everybody knew.

Mademoiselle Thiers had shown me an illustration of a small bearded man in a crown beneath the letters P-É-P-I-N. And, even though I had only just started learning to read, I had the feeling that those letters were proof that I was wrong. When she said, 'You interrupted the class, have you something to say?' I had replied: 'Next time, I'll be right.' She wrote the word insolent in my school notebook and underlined it twice. 'Please ask your parents to sign this.'

I walked home along the Chemin des Brousses with my twice-underlined insolence and my martyred expression. Of all the boys in the area, I was the only one who liked school, and I was the best. It was hardly my fault that the king had a dog's name, was it?

Jean-Baptiste Andrea is a director, screenwriter and author. Born in 1971, he grew up in Cannes. His first novel, Ma Reine, was published in 2017 and won 12 literary prizes including the Prix du Premier Roman and the Prix Femina des Lycéens. Born in Nottinghamshire, England in 1970, Sam Taylor began his career as a journalist with The Observer. In 2001, he moved to southwest France, where he wrote four novels. In 2010, he translated his first novel: Laurent Binet's HHhH. He now lives in the United States and works as a literary translator and author. Recent translations include The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, The Heart (for which he won the French-American Translation Prize) and Lullaby/The Perfect Nanny.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX JOSEPH KESSEL 2020

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRAND PRIX DE L'ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE 2019

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRAND PRIX DES BLOGUEURS LITTÉRAIRES 2019

'Unforgettable' Mail on Sunday

'Powerful' Sunday Times

'Spare, elegant and poetic, this slender novel is quietly devastating' Daily Mail
'A tense exploration of obsession and camaraderie, made more arresting still by the contrast between its slender form and the epic nature of its backdrop' Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer

'Breathless and heartbreaking . . . Tracing a treasure that waits just out of reach, A Hundred Million Years and a Day speaks to the adventurers within us all' Foreword Reviews

'Using beautiful imagery and poetic language, Andrea takes us to the mountains for an adventure that is as cruel as it is magical' Le Figaro

'Gripping and poetic, it keeps you hooked until the final page' La Croix

'Under Jean-Baptiste Andrea's skilled penmanship, the alpine adventure novel becomes a moving tale of personal discovery, and the fossil, a brilliant metaphor for the search for perfection' Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire

'The author's voice has the imagination to move mountains, but shows an awareness that the journey means more than the destination. We're with the narrator every step of the way, admiring his determination to fulfil his dream' Libération

'Go and buy it now. . . Andrea's beautiful words are both heartrending and comforting' Télématin

'The poetry of the language and intensity of feeling give nature an intoxicating splendour' Le Matricule des Anges

'A sublime and beautiful book' Carys Davies