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An engaging historical fiction set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that ranges between India, France and England, inspired by the real-life automaton that resides in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum depicting a tiger savaging a British soldier, complete with growls and screams from the bellows-driven organ hidden inside the piece. Nothing is known about the real creator(s) of the piece, but the author has created an entertaining fictional backstory. Our tale opens in 1790s Mysore, India, when 17-year-old Abbas, a gifted woodcarver, is summoned from his father’s workshop to the imperious Sultan Tipu’s palace and ordered to join with a transplanted Frenchman, a master clockmaker, to create the tiger-chomping-the-Englishman piece. This is driven by the Sultan’s desire to demonstrate how advanced his kingdom is and not a little by wishful thinking as the British East India Company threatens militarily. Abbas is soon swept up in battle as his world is turned upside down and everything he knows destroyed and scattered. He eventually follows his former master to France, hoping to reunite with him and complete his apprenticeship, then learning that their tiger piece had ended up in England as loot (er, spoils of war) and tracks it to the eccentric Englishwoman who considers it one of the pearls of her extensive collection of orientalia. A sweeping, colourful story that makes some points about colonialism.