In The Chemistry of Tears Peter Carey delivers a heartbreakingly beautiful and archly inventive story of love, loss and the birth of the machine age.

When her lover dies suddenly, all Catherine has left is her work. In an act of compassion her manager at London’s Swinburne Museum gives her a very particular project- a box of intricate clockwork parts that constitute a nineteenth-century automaton, a beautiful mechanical bird. It’s an object made of equal parts magic, love, madness and science, a delight that contains the seeds of our age’s downfall. Once Catherine discovers the diary of the man who commissioned it, one obsession merges into another.