The Chemistry of Tears - Peter Carey

Title: The Chemistry of Tears
Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Group Australia
Format: Hardcover
First Australian Edition, 2012
ISBN: 9781926428154

Condition: Very good second-hand condition. Hardcover boards remain clean and bright with only light shelf wear and minor handling marks. Binding is firm and pages are clean throughout.

The Chemistry of Tears is a literary novel of grief, obsession, mechanics, and memory from two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey.

When museum conservator Catherine Gehrig suffers a devastating personal loss, she is secretly assigned the restoration of a mysterious nineteenth-century automaton commissioned by a wealthy Englishman for the woman he loves. As Catherine works through the intricate clockwork mechanisms and hidden histories of the machine, two narratives unfold across centuries — one set in contemporary London and the other in Victorian England.

Blending historical fiction, psychological drama, science, and gothic atmosphere, Carey explores the strange intersections between emotion and machinery, desire and control, restoration and decay. The novel is richly detailed, intellectually playful, and deeply human beneath its mechanical surface.