Rasero
by Francisco Rebolledo | 
The Rich Are Different
by Susan Howatch | 
In the Distance
by Hernan Diaz | 
Legacy
by James A. Michener |
Sins of the Fathers
by Susan Howatch | 
The Anatomist
by Federico Andahazi | 
The Dean's Watch
by Elizabeth Goudge | 
My Heart Laid Bare
by Joyce Carol Oates | 
The River Road
by Frances Parkinson Keyes | 
The Other Side of the Sun
by Madeleine L'Engle | 
Signals of Distress
by Jim Crace | 
Captains and the Kings
by Taylor Caldwell | 
A City of Bells
by Elizabeth Goudge | 
Ingenious Pain
by Andrew Miller | 
The Establishment
by Howard Fast | 
Paris
by Edward Rutherfurd | 
Abundance
by Sena Jeter Naslund | 
In a Dark Wood Wandering
by Hella S. Haasse | 
Lies Told in Silence
by M. K. Tod | 
The Beautiful American
by Jeanne Mackin |
In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre. Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past, A Case of Curiosities places Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.