The Mechanical Heavens of Wraxall Hall

About this book:

In the damp autumn of 1720, the Earl of Wraxall stakes his crumbling estate on a single, impossible wager: that the heavens run not on divine geometry, but on brass, iron, and the stubborn friction of a machine he is building in his own ballroom. With bailiffs circling and his family silver already melted down, Lord Ambrose constructs a thirty-foot orrery driven by three tons of falling pig-iron—a colossal clockwork model designed to catch the return of the Great Comet of 1618 and win a fortune from Dutch underwriters before the Royal Society can claim the prize.

But the machine demands more than calculation. It requires ruby pallets that can withstand twenty-four hundredweight of shock, a sixty-foot pendulum beating in a cellar of rapeseed oil, and a young London artisan who begins to suspect his patron has engineered not an instrument, but a catastrophe. As gears mesh and the great weight rises, the line between astronomy and alchemy, between salvation and ruin, grows as thin as a escapement's tooth.

*The Mechanical Heavens of Wraxall Hall* is a triumph of historical imagination—a clockpunk masterpiece where Newtonian physics fights dirty against the gravity of debt, and one man's obsession turns a decaying mansion into a cathedral of precision. For readers who love the intricate machinery of *The Clockwork Universe* and the atmospheric pressure of *Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*, this is a novel that ticks with the terrifying, beautiful certainty of the spheres themselves.