Description: Ingeniously combining magic, memory, and history, Ciaran Carson constructs his story around the concept of shamrock tea, a drink that allows people to experience the world with visionary clarity. But this magical substance can only be found by passing through van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Marriage. The characters who know this secret include young Carson, his uncle Celstine, his cousin Berenice, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Father Browne, and the nephew of the famous Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Everything connects with everything else: one of the book's presiding geniuses is Arthur Conan Doyle, who believes the world can be read in a drop of water. Shamrock Tea is an homage to this idea, to an enchantingly medieval sense of the unity of the world, which is also called magic.

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