Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded
for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that
of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr.
Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs,
Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford
to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into
fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to
collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in
tongues will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of
novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The Fountains
of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a
reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power.
Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, " in which
Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on the quartet of
novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.