The planet is in continual disagreement with its best clocks, so how are we to bring them into harmony?
When his wife Elizabeth dies from a disease which destroys first her memory, then her personality and finally her physical being, watchmaker Robert Garrett decides to remember her by embarking on a special project. All his life he has been obsessed with an age-old question: can there ever be such a thing as a perfectly accurate time-piece?
Elizabeth's memorial will be a traditionally built mechanical watch in which he hopes natural imperfections of every kind will conspire to create a flawless instrument.
From the sundials of the ancient Greeks to the Horizontal Instrument perfected by Englishman William Oughtred in 1635, and from the master watchmakers of Switzerland to the hydrogen maser clocks of today, Christopher Wilkin's novel brilliantly interweaves the fascinating history of time-keeping with meditations on memory and personality, and the moving story of a marriage tragically cut short.
