The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

Nik, I suspect you won't like this. It's very Peter Carey, if that's not too obvious a thing to say, and I don't really get the sense you're that much of a Carey fan?

Look, I read this a long time ago. But, as far as I recall: There's a grieving woman in a really awkward position - widowed ( do you say that about not-wives?) mistress of many years - and a sick boy with a misguided dad and complicated duck machine clock creature. They're separated by, let's say, a hundred + years and brought together by lovely old notebooks in old fashioned German.

There's a lot of talk about moving parts and mechanical junk which I found oddly intriguing. And, in a sense, this is a consideration of how all the tricky, big, small, obvious, fragile, intricate moving parts of us have to work together to perform what seem to be, when viewed from the outside, some pretty simple actions.