The Chemickal Marriage

Jul 27, 2025 3:04 AM

Author:G.W. Dahlquist

'If HBO are looking for a project to follow Game of Thrones, they need seek no further . . . an epic' Scotsman

The adventure continues in G.W. Dahlquist's The Chemickal Marriage, the follow up to the popular The Glass Book of Dream Eaters and The Dark Volume.

Miss Temple, young, wealthy and far away from home, never wanted to be a heroine. Yet her fiancé is dead (admittedly, by her own hand), her companions slain and her nemesis, the terrifyingly wicked Contessa Lacquer-Sforza, escaped. It falls on her tiny shoulders to destroy a deadly cabal whose alchemy threatens to enslave the world. Miss Temple plots her revenge.

But Dr Svenson and Cardinal Chang are alive, barely - their bodies corrupted by the poisonous blue glass. Wounded and outnumbered, Miss Temple, Dr Svenson and Cardinal Chang pursue their enemies through city slums and glittering palaces as they fight to prevent the cabal's crushing dominion and unholy marriage between man and machine.

Dahlquist's rip-roaring adventure sees an assassin, an heiress and a surgeon battle against the world's most unholy evil, in their final quest.

'If HBO are looking for a project to follow Game of Thrones, they need seek no further . . . an epic which...will only grow in popularity over the years [thanks to] its virtues, hi-jinks, horror, decadence and derring-do' Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

'Fantastic. Somewhere between Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and Rider Haggard. I was in seventh heaven' Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth on The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

G. W. Dahlquist is a novelist and playwright. When he fell asleep during a snowstorm, his first book The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters came to him in a dream. This is his third novel. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in New York.

Reviews

An elegant essay on traditional Japanese aesthetics by the great novelist. A delight to read

—— Independent on Sunday

A highly infectious essay lauding all things shady and subtly hidden

—— Guardian

The outstanding Japanese novelist of this century

—— Edmund White

This is a powerfully anti-modernist book, yet contains the most beautiful evocation of the traditional Japanese aesthetic... More like a poem than an essay

—— Building Design

I am convinced that Tanizaki is one of the few great writers of our time. He is an author of outstanding stature and deserves to be far better known outside Japan than he is

—— Ivan Morris

That it is a work of art can never be in doubt

—— New Statesman

It comes to remind the Western reader that the razzle dazzle of electric lighting was foreign for thousands of years … above all, it highlights the fact that shadow is inseparable from our holistic and spiritual relationship with light

—— Lighting

Sincere, resolute

—— Jonathan Barnes , Literary Review

This extraordinary and quite brilliant first novel describes a life that is bumping along the very bottom...The writing is wonderfully inventive, encompassing grim reality and wild, romantic fantasy, and the true magic lies in the way the author manages to present the fragments as a funny, charming, beautiful whole

—— Kate Saunders , The Times

Remarkable story

—— TLS

The most original book I have read for quite a long time

—— Observer

Riverting ... both disturbing and entertaining, with twisted low-life chracters rivalling any created by Martin Amis or Nicola Barker

—— Leyla Sanai , Spectator

Sounds like a must-read

—— Reading Matters

Utterly remarkable…sad in its depth, but delightful on the shimmering surface… It might only be February, but there's going to need to be some strong competition in the months to come if this doesn't end up being my book of the year

—— The Bookbag

A wonderful survivor’s story… It’s excellent

—— Peter Murchie , British Journal of General Practice

The Innocents has garnered her a next-Zadie-Smith style buzz.

—— Tatler

Segal writes with delicacy, accumulating details that create the texture of Adam and Rachel’s world… Adam is well drawn and not unsympathetic, and Segal has skillfully created a cast of secondary characters, including Ziva, a survivor of the Holocaust.

—— Tina Jackson , Metro

It takes chutzpah to appropriate such a well-loved classic but Segal parallels the two convention-bound worlds with aplomb… [a] classily composed comedy of manners

—— Emma Hagestadt , Independent

Impresive debut…a poised text

—— Elizabeth Buchan , Sunday Times

Wittily observant

—— Caroline Jowett , Daily Express

Hugely enjoyable first novel... The end result falls somewhere between Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad (about a matriarchal Jewish rabbi) and David Nicholl's One Day (with its theme of mismatched love) and is all the more pleasing for that

—— Viv Groskop , Observer

Elegant little novel and a real delight to read

—— BookOxygen.com

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