The Collector Collector takes a conventional boy-meets-girl story and turns it into a brilliant comic romp. The hero of Tibor Fischer's tale is an antique bowl that comes into the possession of a lovelorn, young London art appraiser named Rosa. Rosa's bowl is no ordinary piece of clay, however: it is a ceramic sage, an urn of uncommon erudition that has witnessed all of history's major convulsions--revolutions, famines, massacres, wars--and has survived more than four hundred breakages and three thousand thefts.

By investing his bowl with soul, Fischer give us a hilarious, mantel- eye view of depravity and redemption, sex and lust, burglary and archaeology. "A writer gifted with a formidable imagination" (The Washington Post Book World), Fischer takes us on a thrilling ride from the primitive societies of prehistory to the equally primitive society of present-day London.