The Solitudes

John Crowley

oct 2007 · The Aegypt Cycle Libro 1 · Abrams

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World Fantasy Award-Winning Author: “Affecting, cerebral, surprising and delightful . . . [An] extraordinary philosophical romance.” —Publishers Weekly

John Crowley’s Ægypt series is a landmark in contemporary fiction. The series helped earn Crowley the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and Harold Bloom installed its first two volumes in his Western canon. In The Solitudes, the opening of the series—nominated for both a World Fantasy Award and an Arthur C. Clarke Award—we are introduced to Pierce Moffett, an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology, myths, and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real, geographical Egypt but Ægypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett moves from Manhattan to a small town upstate, and discovers the historical novels of little-known local writer Fellowes Kraft, his course is charted. Kraft’s books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Dee—stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffett’s real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffett’s journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world.

“A quirky celebration of truths that lie hidden, and an impassioned plea for the freedom to discover them.” —USA Today

“The narrative itself, which spirals through time and space rather like a maze that Pierce must penetrate, startles the reader again and again with the eloquent rightness of the web of coincidences that structure it.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Suggests an unlikely but thriving marriage between a writer like Anne Tyler and one such as Jorge Luis Borges.” —Publishers Weekly

Previously published as Ægypt

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John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 14th volume of fiction (Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land) in 2005. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.