Mori made Grace’s watch, whose filigree rearranges itself into a swallow when the lid is lifted: “Clever tracks of clockwork let it fly and swoop along the inside of the lid, silver wings clinking.” He also made the pocket watch whose ear-piercing alarm startles Thaniel out of the path of a terrorist time bomb. What connects them, although they don’t yet know it, is the eponymous watchmaker, one Baron Mori, a brilliant and mysterious figure who appears able to predict the future. Her friend Akira Matsumoto is the emperor of Japan’s second cousin. Grace Carrow is studying physics at one of Oxford’s new women’s colleges. Nathaniel Steepleton is a telegraph clerk at the Home Office in London. Set mostly in 1880s London, Pulley’s debut novel twists typical steampunk elements-telegraphs, gaslight, clockwork automata-into a fresh and surprising philosophical adventure.
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