The Chemistry of Tears / Peter Carey 229 p.

My first Peter Carey experience.  A woman who makes her living as a museum curator restoring antique clocks loses her lover and descends into grief that borders on madness.  She is given a special project: the restoration of a 19th-century robotic duck.  As she works, she becomes entangled in the journals of the forlorn man who commissioned the duck, himself a grieving father.  Strange and a bit sinister; I can't say I understood all of this, but it was engrossing.