The Chemistry of Tears
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Peter Carey
Knopf, 240 pages, $26
Catherine Gehrig, conservator of clocks at London’s Swinburne Museum, is grieving over the death of her lover. She reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life, at the same time uncovering a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a 19th-century Englishman, Henry Brandling. An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet: two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this novel.
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