His life is saved by Madeleine, witch, mid-wife, abortionist.

Always an outsider, aged 10, he falls in love with a tiny singer.

She mends his ailing heart with a cuckoo clock and becomes his adoptive mother.

Little Jack, the boy with the cuckoo-clock heart, is born on the coldest day on earth in Victorian Edinburgh.

Her eyelids are endlessly and soon annoyingly compared to parasols.

He flees across Europe in pursuit of Miss Acacia.

He pokes out his rival’s eye in a fight.