The Jade Cabinet

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. This story includes a (literally) magical escape from tyranny and an intriguing plot twist at the finish.

"Ducornet has no time for realism, preferring instead an incredibly pungent, heady and violent brew of words . . . in which each sensation seems to be multiplied threefold and each character is ten times larger than life." –London Review of Books

"[Ducornet] writes like a stunned time-traveler, testifying in breathless fragments to exotic ages that have gone or never were." –Chicago Tribune

Chapter One of The Jade Cabinet begins,
Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real. The ambiguity so delighted my father that with my mother's permission I was named Memory—a curious coincidence considering this memoir which has seized the lion's part of my relic years. I write from the new century about the old, my purpose to reanimate planets that have long ceased to spin.
This memoir includes the reminiscences of Radulph Tubbs (his Egyptian journals and Oxford papers have long been in my keeping)—prideful outpourings touched, it is true, by an undeniable wistfulness and more: remorse, yet filled with misconceptions and misinformed by a certain callousness of heart—surely the greatest burden of his vast inheritance. I also quote tatters from my sister's own diary—so badly trampled by Tubbs as to be, for the most part, illegible.
Chapter Two of The Jade Cabinet begins,
There are those who say that the memory is like a collector's cabinet where souvenirs are tucked away as moths or tiny shells intact. But I think not. As I write this it occurs to me that for each performance of the mind our souvenirs reconstruct themselves. The memory is like an act of magic.

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