The Theory of Clouds

Akira Kumo miraculously survived the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, only to reinvent himself as a man twenty years younger. Now an eccentric couturier living in Paris, he has acquired the world's largest collection of literature on clouds and meteorology. Kumo hires Virginie Latour to help him catalog his library. As they work, he tells her the stories of those who have devoted their lives to clouds: the English Quaker Luke Howard, a contemporary of Napoleon and Goethe, who first classified clouds; the painter Carmichael who became obsessed with capturing clouds on canvas; and the wealthy late-nineteenth-century amateur meteorologist Richard Abercrombie, a photographer who aspired to create the definitive catalog of clouds - but only one copy exists, and it has never been seen. Kumo sends Virginie to London to track down the fabled Abercrombie Protocol, a quest both surprising and wondrous, where love, like clouds, forms and transforms lives.