"What is your name? Where did you come from? And where are you going? In this immersive novel set in the 1840s Britain and France, these questions probe at the essence of what it means to be human. A wet nurse in a lively Scottish household goes by an assumed name but longs to know the identity of her father. A quarryman furtively extricates a remarkable fossil from an island on the Northumberland coast and promptly smuggles it abroad to Paris. A...