The Weather Woman

London, January 1789. Three-year-old Neva Tarshin loses her parents amid a Frost Fair on the frozen Thames and is raised by the clockmaker Victor Friezland. Her ability to hear and predict the weather develops alongside the mechanical ingenuity of her adopted household, but a woman who claims authority over nature risks ridicule, religious suspicion and exclusion from the institutions that decide what counts as knowledge.

Across the years leading to the final great Frost Fair of 1814, Neva adopts an elaborate male identity to present forecasts before men of science and pursue financial independence. Love, inheritance and public curiosity complicate her double life, while automata, gambling, printed predictions and changing weather give the magical premise a tangible Georgian setting. The novel explores the uncertain boundary between spectacle and experiment and the disguises women were forced to adopt before their intelligence could be heard.