Far from glorious, Napoleon's hundred days are a period of defeat and retreat, beginning with the Emperor's flight from Elba and running up to his defeat at Waterloo. In Roth's conjuring, we see the disgruntled and distracted figure mostly through the eyes of his laundress in Paris. Working at the Tuileries palace, Angelina Pietri is a shy devotee of the great man, aware of his hubris but sympathetic to his overwhelming loneliness. Her love goes unrequited, and her life goes on, with other clients and a son to care for, but her heart remains with the Emperor to the end. A thoroughly realised work of imaginative sympathy, the novel shows Roth at the height of his powers.



Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was born into a Jewish family in the small town of Brody in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied first in Lemberg and then in Vienna, and served in the Austrian army during World War I. He later worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin, travelling widely, staying in hotels and living out of suitcases, while also becoming a prolific writer of fiction. Roth left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and settled in Paris, where he died just before the outbreak of World War II.As well as his masterpiece The Radetzky March, he was the author of over two dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including On the End of the World, The Coral Merchant and Flight Without End, all published by or forthcoming from Pushkin Press.Born in New York, Richard Panchyk is the author, editor or translator of fifty-three books, including three translations of novels by Joseph Roth, who was a distant relative of his. His non-fiction World War II for Kids was named a Notable Book of 2003 by the National Council for the Social Studies.



A novel of great sensitivity and resonance. The Hundred Days is a meditation on the nature of greatness and love's dogged loyalty, interwoven with the well-balanced irony that is Roth's trademark. It's a sad little gem.



An achingly beautiful fictional account of the rise and fall of the Emperor Napoleon.



The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than a tragedie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction.



There is a poem on every page of Joseph Roth.



This is not perhaps the real Napoleon, but it's certainly a remarkable creation that leaps off the page.



What a marvelous writer! Read him now. You can thank me later.



This is not the Man of Destiny straddling Europe, nor even the Little Corporal of the schoolbooks; this Napoleon is ... a softer, far more wistful figure ... a dreamer This is a book of reveries, of quiet fantasy, of long-extinguished emotions, in which two lives are softly intermingled.