World Fantasy Award-Winning Author: โAffecting, cerebral, surprising and delightful . . . [An] extraordinary philosophical romance.โ โPublishers Weekly
John Crowleyโs รgypt 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 seriesโnominated for both a World Fantasy Award and an Arthur C. Clarke Awardโwe 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 รgypt, 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. Kraftโs books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Deeโstories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffettโs real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffettโs journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world.
โA quirky celebration of truths that lie hidden, and an impassioned plea for the freedom to discover them.โ โUSA Today
โThe 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.โ โThe New York Times Book Review
โSuggests an unlikely but thriving marriage between a writer like Anne Tyler and one such as Jorge Luis Borges.โ โPublishers Weekly
Previously published as รgypt