Gabriel dreams of buying back Malaterre, an estate built by his ancestors in the heart of the jungle over a century ago. Of going there, living there, and restoring the Lesaffre family honor. Of passing it on to his children. But he knows nothing about the country or managing a timber forest. He will have to risk it all, taking his two eldest with him and separating them from their mother and younger brother. All of this, of course, is completely crazy.

The year is 1934. Rasputin holds the reins of government. When the Czar is mortally wounded in an ambush, the mad monk turns to his Council of Dark Mages and his former mentor, Baba Yaga. Together, they concoct a plan that involves trench warfare mechas, mind-to-mind transfers, and the long-lost heir to the Romanoff throne: Kyril Noskov, a hero of the war that's been raging since 1914, to which generations of Russian youth have been sacrificed. Roulot and Rodier's reimagining of a Russia that never was blends science fact and dark fantasy into a spellbinding fable of the price of power.

Certain details surrounding the death of Albert Einstein are so outlandish as to sound like urban legend: namely, the theft of his brain by Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who performed the eminent physicist's autopsy. From these historical events, Pierre-Henry Gomont concocts a picaresque road trip of a tale by turns farcical and moving, whimsical and melancholy, sweeping up in its narrative whirlwind the FBI, a sanatorium, neurobiology, hallucinogens, hospital bureaucracy, and romance. In his dissection of friendship and the forging of scientific reputation, the nimble cartoonist serves up a slice of lovingly rendered Americana for the ages.