Peter Carey

Forced to hide her grief when her married lover dies unexpectedly, museum curator Catherine Gehrig works in solitude to restore a 19th-century automaton and finds comfort in the journals of its adventurous commissioner. By the two-time Man Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda. 50,000 first printing.

The Chemistry of Tears

Melody Izard

I am usually so hard on books. I don't know why. But it doesn't take much to make me lop off a star. But this one I forgave, (although I didn't have to forgive much). I felt so protective of the characters and the story and forgave the fact that there are some things I still don't get. 
This is a story of love and hope. Of the inherent good and evil in all things. Of connection. Of separation. Of the past and the present.
The automaton represents the beginning of the machine age. An invitation to taste the allure of oil. A beginning of an addiction. A beautiful, magical thing that belongs to Lucifer. A promise of a cure and a vow to bring a better life. As Catherine attempts to restore the duck or swan or whatever the diabolically perfect little machine is while also restoring her soul after losing her secret lover - a symbol of that dependency on oil spews its bile deep on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, harming or killing all sea life in its path and inserting itself chemically and emotionally into the chain of all life. 
Peter Carey. Sometimes I want to toss your books in that very oily Gulf you refer to. But this one I want to savor and study and talk about.

David Pascuzzo

Alexander Lobov

cenk karagören

Julie D.

An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, a secret love story, and the fate of the warming world are all brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time. London 2011, Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the unexpected death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man she has to grieve in private. One other person knows their secret, the director of the museum, who arranges for Catherine to be given a special project away from prying eyes. Mad with grief, the usually controlled and rational Catherine discovers a series of handwritten notebooks telling the story of the man who originally commissioned the extraordinary and eerie automata she has been asked to bring back to life. With a precocious new assistant, Amanda, at her side, she starts to piece together both the clockwork puzzle and the story of the mechanical creature which was commissioned in 19th century Germany by an English man, Henry Brandling, as a 'magical amusement' for his consumptive son. Having been asked to leave his home by his wife, Henry turns his hurtful departure into an adventure that he records for his young child. But it is Catherine Gehrig, in a strangely stormy and overheated London nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in reading Henry's story. And it is the automata, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of life and death, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention and the body's astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

The Chemistry of Tears

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