The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha HuntHoughton Mifflin, 2008

It’s 1943 and Nicola Tesla is eighty-six and living in obscurity in the Hotel New Yorker: in this novel, a snooping chambermaid whose father’s best friend claims to have just built a time machine befriends him; he talks to the pigeons on his windowsill; the ghost of Sam Clemens writes Tesla’s biography. The New York details of this book are wonderful: it opens with Tesla thinking about dust, all the pieces of other lives floating around: “some buckwheat flour blown in from a Portuguese bakery on Minetta Lane and a pellicle of curled felt belonging to the haberdashery around the corner” (p 1). The other thing about this novel I liked is its sense of romance: the story of Louisa, the chambermaid, and a mysterious man she meets on the train who claims to know her from elementary school, and the story of Walter, Louisa’s father, meeting his wife at the opening of the public library, their walks through the city together, the sense of wonder and awe. There’s wonder and awe in the Tesla parts of the book too, and in the sciencey parts and the speculative parts, but mostly in the romantic bits and the city bits (which perhaps says more about my personal biases than about the book!).