New Novel by Peter Carey Announced

"The Chemistry of Tears," a new novel by prizewinning author Peter Carey, the executive director of Hunter's MFA in Creative Writing Program, will be published in the UK next April by the British publishing house Faber and Faber. Publication will be "a huge global event," predicts Faber, with Penguin Australia publishing in February and Knopf US and Random House Canada in May.

"Chemistry of Tears" begins in London as Catherine Gehrig, a museum conservator, learns of the death of her colleague and longtime lover, a married man. While quietly grieving, she is assigned the job of restoring a rare 19th-century automaton,which could be crucial to the museum's future funding. She starts to uncover its history, that of an Englishman who travelled to Germany in the 1850s to commission a "magical amusement" for his tubercular son.

Faber Senior Editor Angus Carvill described the novel as "classic Peter Carey, a superbly worked twin narrative that more than lives up to its beautiful title as it follows the stories of these two characters from different times. After the huge success of Carey's 'Parrot and Oliver in America,' it is incredibly exciting to have another such strong novel."

Carey has won the Man Booker Prize twice, for "Oscar and Lucinda" (1988) and "True History of the Kelly Gang" (2001) and "Parrot and Oliver" was shortlisted for both the Booker and a National Book Award.