The Chemistry Of Tears by two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey is a heartbreakingly beautiful and archly inventive story of love, loss and the birth of the machine age.
When her lover dies, all Catherine has left is her work. A museum curator, Catherine is given a project by the head of her department: a box of clockwork parts that appear to be the remains of a mechanical bird.
When she discovers that the box also contains the diary of the man who commissioned the machine, she is partially rescued from one obsession by another. Who were Henry Brandling and the mysterious clockmaker he hired to make a gift for his absent son? And what was the end result that now sits in pieces in her studio?