Overview:
An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.
London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.
As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a magical amusement for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.
`Everything is burnished with vitalisingly poetic images. The Chemistry of Tears isn't only about life and inventiveness: it overflows with them.' --Peter Kemp, SUNDAY TIMES
`I loved this book for its mysteries, its hinted back stories, its reserve, and its underlying complexity.' --Lucy Daniel, DAILY TELEGRAPH
`Characters that beguile and convince, prose that dances or is as careful as poetry, an inventive plot that teases and makes the heart quicken or hurt ... this tender tour de force of the imagination succeeds on all fronts.' --Rebecca K. Morrison, INDEPENDENT
`It is remarkable, and rather cheering, to find that the fine bloom on his writing, the sharp, green bite of emotion and the pellucid observation seem entirely unaffected by success.' --Jane Shilling, EVENING STANDARD
`Yet another triumph for its creator, breath-catchingly beautiful and tender in places, with strange and shocking revelations slowly revealed.'
--Camilla Pia, THE LIST
'The book that has haunted me all year is Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears. Carey's intricately engineered novel explores the connection between heartsickness and precise and intellectually demanding manual labour.' --Jane Shilling, THE STANDARD, Books of the Year
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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