For readers of This Is  Where I Leave You and Everything Is Illuminated, “a brilliant and  compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history and humor”  (Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here) When the greatest  female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander “Sasha”  Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it  the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most  difficult problems in all of mathematics, and has spitefully taken the  solution to her grave. As a ragtag group of mathematicians from around  the world descends upon Rachela’s shiva, determined to find the proof or  solve it for themselves—even if it means prying up the floorboards for  notes or desperately scrutinizing the mutterings of her African Grey  parrot—Sasha must come to terms with his mother’s outsized influence on  his life. Spanning decades and continents, from a crowded living  room in Madison, Wisconsin, to the windswept beach on the Barents Sea  where a young Rachela had her first mathematical breakthrough, The  Mathematician’s Shiva is an unexpectedly moving and uproariously funny  novel that captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to achieve  the impossible.