A great mind and a formidable personality, Brahe is also the world’s most illustrious noseless man of his time. Told by Brahe and his assistants—a filthy cast of characters—Sublunar is both novel and almanac. Alongside sexual deviancy, spankings, ruminations on a new nose—flesh, wood, or gold?—Brahe (a choleric and capricious character) and his peculiar helpers (“I would rather watch her globes tonight than icy stars”) take painstaking measurements that will revolutionize astronomy, long before the invention of the telescope. Meanwhile the plague rages in Europe…

The second in Voetmann’s triptych of historical novels, Sublunar is as visceral, absurd, and tragic as its predecessor, Awake, but with a special nocturnal glow and a lunatic-edged gaze trained on the moon and the stars.

In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies.

In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.