Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Darwin’s Ghosts tells the story of the collective discovery of evolution, from Aristotle to Al-Jahiz, an Arab writer in the first century, from Leonardo da Vinci to Denis Diderot in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police.