The Sensualist

Helen Martin is a scholar of antique anatomical illustration. She knows the human body inside and out. But she doesn't know her own body anymore, because Helen is, quite literally, losing her senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste; all are disappearing. And she has starting hallucinating - for surely it is a hallucination - that her body is being replaced, piece by piece, with someone else's. Her husband, too, seems to be lost; vanished during a business trip to Europe.

Things grow more curious when Helen sets off to find him. On the night train to Vienna, mysteries proliferate. A parade of characters - from the grotesque to the jolly to the inexplicable - present her with bizarre gifts, gossip, rumor. Much of her unaccountable experience Helen is prepared to attribute to jet lag and a nasty head cold, until a gruesome murder at an anatomical museum alerts her to the fact that someone is taking her visit very seriously indeed.

In this extraordinary sortie into the visual and literary realms of the imagination, mystery awaits at every turn. Helen's search takes her through the capitals of old Europe and from the sixteenth century to World War II to last winter. But her real journey lies within, as each of her five senses comes alive with catastrophic acuity. With each step, the history of her body is being rewritten in an unknown hand.