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|title=The Chemistry of Tears

|sort=Chemistry of Tears

|publisher=Faber and Faber

|date=April 2012

|website=http://www.http://petercareybooks.com

|summary=A book about grief and about machines and our relationship with them. Two parallel stores - one set in 2010 London and another in nineteenth century Germany - combine in this book which is sometimes challenging but is carried by Carey's superb prose.

}}

As he has done before on several occasions, Peter Carey offers us two parallel stories in his intriguingly titled ''The Chemistry of Tears''. The two elements of the title reflect that this is a book about grief, but also about science. It's also a book about human's relationship with machines and dependence that we have grown to have on them, and the ugliness of life and the beauty of, at least some, machines. In one strand of the story, Catherine is a modern day horologist working in a London museum whose world is shattered by the death of a married colleague with whom she was having an affair. Put to work on restoring a mysterious clockwork bird, she discovers the journals of Henry Brandling, the nineteenth century wealthy man who commissioned the construction of the toy for his consumptive son.