Search Worlds Without End

There is more than one history of the world.

Before science defined the modern age, other powers, wondrous and magical, once governed the universe, their lore perfected within a lost capital of hieroglyphs, wizard-kings, and fabulous monuments, not Egypt -- but Ægypt.

What if it were really so?

In the 1970s, a historian named Pierce Moffett moves to the New England countryside to write a book about Ægypt, driven by an idea he dare not believe -- that the physical laws of the universe once changed and may change again. Yet the notion is not his alone. Something waits at the locked estate of Fellowes Kraft, author of romances about Will Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee, something for which Pierce and those near him have long sought without knowing it, a key, perhaps, to Ægypt.

Also published as The Solitudes.

Love & Sleep continues the tale of Ægypt, a magical country displaced from the physical world. Historian Pierce Moffett's route toward Ægypt had been charted from his youth in the coal hills of Kentucky, where he was introduced to Catholic doctrine and country mysticism, to an urchin girl with ancestral ties to werewolves, and to an elemental creature that may have abetted the forest fire he accidentally started. In the current day, Pierce and Boney Rasmussen, his patron, search the work of historical novelist Fellowes Kraft for clues to a fabulous treasure--an endeavor that parallels the adventures of Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee, centuries before, to sort out a cosmology on the edge of profound change.

Stately, gorgeously rendered, both wide and deep, this second volume in the Ægypt quartet will reward those searching for an absorbing literary fantasy.

For the past two decades, John Crowley has created some of the most beautiful and evocative fiction written anywhere. A recipient of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, he has written yet another masterpiece that brings together his distinctive blend of magic, mystery, adventure, and wonder.

When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn't come all at once but passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse's skin.

For the people in this novel, the concerns of everyday life -- children and love affairs, work and friendship -- are beginning to transmute into the extraordinary and to reveal the forces, dark and light, that truly govern their lives.

So it is for Pierce Moffett, would-be historian and author, who has moved from New York to the Faraway Hills, where he seems to discover -- or rediscover -- a path into magic, past and present. And so it is for Rosie Rasmussen, a single mother grappling with her mysterious uncle's legacy and her young daughter Samantha's inexplicable seizures. For Pierce's lover Rose Ryder, whose life is lived half in dream, another path unfolds: she's drawn into a cult that promises to exorcise her demons.

A great cycle of time is ending, as it did once before, in the bygone days of witchcraft and wars of religion. The lives of Renaissance wizard John Dee and rogue philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, haunt the present: their stories, true and false, are being reenacted in the peaceful Faraway Hills and may hold the key to the future.

It is the dark of the year, between Halloween and the winter solstice, and the gateway is open between the worlds of the living and the dead. Pierce and Rosie, Samantha and Rose Ryder, and their enemies and allies -- who have powers hidden until now--must take sides in an age-old war that is approaching the final battle.

Or is it? In a John Crowley novel, nothing is as it seems. Crowley draws us into a cosmic tug-of-war between familiarity and strangeness, couples us with characters much like ourselves, and then works his own potent magic on the proceedings. Daemonomania is a journey into the very mystery of existence: what is, what went before, and what could break through at any moment in our lives.

Endless Things is the fourth and final novel in John Crowley's AEgypt sequence. Crowley explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal, through the interwoven histories of philosopher-martyr Giordano Bruno, the marriage of the Winter King and the beginning of the Thirty Years War, the fragmented story of the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross, and the restoration of Pierce Moffett to the world and time and place which he has made for himself.