In his debut novel, which overnight elevated the young author to the top of the British literary Olympus, Lawrence Norfolk connects the seemingly incompatible: the founding of the East India Company in 1600 and the siege of La Rochelle twenty-seven years later, the release of the Classic Lampriere's Dictionary of Antiquity" on the eve of the Great French Revolution and the Nine Secret Rulers of the World, the winding automata of the miracle mechanic Vaucanson and the Flying Man - the "Spirit of Rochelle". Alternating between episodes creepy to the point of shuddering and funny to the point of hysteria, Norfolk masterfully keeps the reader in suspense from the first page to the last - whether he describes paranoid explorations worthy of the pen of Pynchon himself, or the delirium of love's charm.