London 2010, 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. The museum director, aware of Catherine's grief, gives her a special project - to piece together both the mechanics and the story of an automata.

The automata is a clockwork puzzle, commissioned in 19th-century Germany by an English clockmaker, Henry Brandling, as a ‘magical amusement' for his dying son.

Linked by the mysterious automata, Catherine and Henry's stories intertwine across time to explore 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 is the haunting new novel from the twice Booker Prize-winning novelist, Peter Carey.

‘Carey is an extraordinarily clever, able writer. He is one of the writers, personally speaking, that I feel most pleased to be alive at the same time as. It is like being alive at the time Dickens was writing, I think he is that good.' Andrew Motion