About the book: 2006 / New novel by P. Enquist - an implausible story based on real events. The intertwining destinies of Blanche Witman, the notorious patient of Dr. J. M. Charcot, and Marie Curie, two-time Nobel Prize winner (Blanche worked in her laboratory for many years), symbolically reflect the convulsions in which the 20th century was born, and radium, discovered by Curie, becomes a metaphor for love with its strange ability to give life and sometimes be deadly. Many facts related to Charcot’s activities and the history of the discovery of radium, and the biographies of these amazing women themselves, are becoming available to the general reader for the first time.