The Physiognomy
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In the Well-Built City, Cley is the perfect judge and jury, the infallible arbiter of life and death, for he is trained in the art/science of physiognomy. To the physiognomist, body shape and facial features reveal every aspect of personality, expose every secret, and even predict the future. When Drachton Below, Master of the Well-Built City, sends his premier physiognomist into the primitive outlands to uncover the thief of an unperishing fruit that may grant immortality, Cley discovers love and the truth about physiognomy. His discoveries unleash horrific destruction and plunge him into Hell--and neither he nor the Master can foresee their revolutionary fate of their world.
A New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the 1998 World Fantasy Award, The Physiognomy may be read with equal success as either fantasy or SF, but it does not much resemble the fiction of either genre. This novel's closest relatives are In the Well-Built City, Dante's Divine Comedy, Kafka's black allegories, and Caleb Carr's crime thriller The Alienist. The brilliant and sardonic Physiognomist Cley is SF/F's most entertainingly arrogant narrator since Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters. You won't believe that this strange, ambitious, and sui generis work is Jeffrey Ford's first novel. --Cynthia Ward
The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas
Ford writes equally well about the scientific cult of precision and the acceptance of ambiguity. You don't have to embrace his antiscience message to appreciate the care and skill that went into its framing.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The Physiognomy
The Physiognomy,Jeffrey Ford,Eos,0380793326,Fantasy - General,Fiction,Fiction - Fantasy,Science Fiction,Science Fiction - General,Fiction / Science Fiction / General,Reading Group Guide
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