A Hundred Million Years and a Day
JEAN-BAPTISTE ANDREA,
Translated by Sam Taylor
(GALLIC BOOKS, 176 PP, £10.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9.89 •Tel 020 7799 4064

This brief, unusual, but supremely effective novel is set on the Franco-Italian border, in the Jurassic Alps, and is narrated by Stanislas, or Stan, a professor of palaeontology nearing retirement, who recalls a story he first heard in the summer of 1954, when he was 25.

Fascinated by fossils since childhood, Stan had become increasingly obsessed by what he had been told by an elderly school caretaker who had got lost in the mountains when he was a boy and had discovered the skeleton of a dinosaur, a “dragon”, inside a cave in a remote mountain glacier. Despite his age and the fact that he suffers from vertigo, Stan determines to organise an expedition to ascertain the truth of the story and if possible excavate the remains of this mythical “trilobite” or “diplodocus”. He assembles a team to ­excavate the glacier: Umberto, an old friend who is an experienced Italian mountaineer, and Umberto’s young German assistant Peter, together with Gio, an elderly, highly respected local guide, who speaks a Venetian patois.