Book description
The son of a reclusive historian finds his mother's drowned body in the
tributary of the River Cam that runs through her garden. She is
clutching a glass prism. Elizabeth Vogelsang's magnum opus, a book on
Isaac Newton's alchemy, is incomplete. Lydia Brooke, a writer friend of
the dead historian, returns to Cambridge to the funeral. It is five
years since she has seen Elizabeth's son, Cameron Brown, with whom she
has had an intermittent love affair that began years earlier. Cambridge,
she discovers, is in the midst of an upsurge of attacks by animal rights
extremists. Cameron, who, as a neuroscientist uses animal
experimentation, has been targeted. Cameron asks Lydia to act as a paid
ghostwriter in the completion of his mother's book, Alchemist. Lydia
agrees to the proposal and moves into Elizabeth's strange house, a
triangular shaped studio on the banks of the Cam. Soon Lydia finds
herself entangled, not only with Cameron, but also with a four-hundred
year-old murder mystery, a network of 17th century alchemists and a
ghostly figure intent on disrupting her work. Rebecca Stott is a
writer and broadcaster. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, is
affiliated to the Cambridge history of science department and is
Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at UEA. Her work,
in radio writing, fiction and non-fiction, weaves together history,
literature and the history of science. She is the author of the
non-fiction book Darwin and the Barnacle.
