The Hundred and Twelve Days

Day 1 was a Tuesday. Sixteen-year-old Layla Al-Amin was finishing her maths homework when the news came on.

In September 2026, Israeli jets strike Iran's nuclear sites. Within a hundred and twelve days the war has closed the world's shipping lanes, drawn in NATO, Korea and Taiwan, and crossed a line that had held for eighty-one years.

This is the story of those days, told by thirty-three people who lived through them.

An Irish peacekeeper in southern Lebanon whose mother rings every night to ask if he's eaten. A history teacher in Roscommon teaching the causes of the First World War while the next one begins. A crane driver in Haifa waiting for her niece to come home from Cyprus. A fisherman in Muscat whose boat stays tied up for sixty days. An oil trader in Houston who makes a fortune on Day 1 and can't live with it. A nurse in Pskov who writes her diary with gaps where certain words should go. A B-2 commander who sits in her jet for eleven hours, waiting for an order that never comes.

And from the front lines in Lebanon, Estonia and Cyprus come reports of something nobody can explain: a light, and the shooting stopping.

Told through journals, letters, voice memos, text messages and testimony, The Hundred and Twelve Days is a novel about how a world war reaches ordinary lives: through prices, through phone calls that won't connect, and through the people who keep paying attention.

Includes a timeline of the war, a glossary and questions for reading groups.