A brilliant clockmaker, a desperate ultimatum, and a husband built by her own hands.

Deaf and non-verbal since childhood, Marguerite Rousseau is given three months to marry or lose her late father's clock shop to a distant, predatory cousin. Refusing to surrender her independence to a patriarchal legal code that demands her subjugation, she locks her doors, opens her father's cabinet, and engineers a masterpiece: a towering clockwork husband crafted from rosewood, brass, and porcelain.

Aurel cannot speak, and Marguerite cannot hear. Together, they forge a profoundly intimate sanctuary built on private sign language and the deep, mechanical vibrations resonating from his clock-heart directly to her pulse.

What begins as a desperate legal contrivance winds into a soul-stirring romance, measured out in quiet, deliberate devotion: the twenty-six daily turns of a brass key, shared hours at the workbench, playful arguments over a stray cat, and riotous garden coaxed from dead earth.

But when Marguerite's cousin returns with the law in his valise, determined to take her shop by force and ruin her name, the violent world beyond their shutters threatens to shatter their fable. Marguerite built Aurel to be a gentle companion, but as the village is forced to decide its true loyalties, she is about to discover just how fiercely her creation will stand between her and the wolves at their door.

The Tale of the Clock-Heart is a sweeping, folkloric love story about the boundaries of the soul, told in the small turns of a shared life.

For Readers Of: The Golem and the Jinni, Frankenstein, and The Wicker Husband.