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The fine line between science and alchemy is examined with vivid and witty
imagination in Robin Chapman’s The Secret of the World, a rollicking
17th-century saga of an ill-matched trio—an alchemist, a rogue and a
madam—which sustains the splenetic invention of its opening (narrated by
the shades of the wrong-side-of-the-law trinity) throughout a sprawling epic
traversing the Old World and the New. Published by Sinclair-Stevenson,
£15.99, ISBN 1856192628.