Anatomy: A Love Story

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

In Edinburgh in 1817, Hazel Sinnett wants a future shaped by knowledge rather than marriage. Denied formal training because of her sex, she strikes a precarious bargain with a celebrated surgeon. If she can prove herself alone, she may be allowed to continue. What she lacks in access, she must make up for in ingenuity, and that means learning anatomy beyond the page.

Jack Currer survives on the city’s margins, earning his living among the dead. When his path crosses Hazel’s, their uneasy alliance offers her what books cannot, and gives him a reason to look more closely at the dangers closing in around them. Bodies vanish from graveyards. Young men disappear from the streets. A feared illness returns, and the powerful look away.

Anatomy: A Love Story moves through a shadowed Edinburgh of lecture halls, closes, and cemeteries, where ambition carries real risk. It is a gothic tale of knowledge pursued at any cost, and of connection forged in a city that makes survival an act of defiance.