John Crowley's cunning alchemy of the here and now and the nevermore, of history and dream history, of the actual and the possible: the most daring and greathearted fiction yet by the award-winning author of Little, Big.

Does the world have a secret history, encoded in myth and legend, reflected in the very windings of our brains?

Born with the talents to be a real historian, but clinging to a minor teaching job, Pierce Moffett watches the great Parade of the '60s go by him, and wonders. He's still wondering years later when, jilted and newly jobless, he gets off a bus by chance in the Faraway Hills and steps unawares into a story that has been awaiting him there.

Does the world have a plot?

It's what Rosie Rasmussen wants to know, too. Will her life have the fearful symmetry of the lives led inside the books she reads? Rosie, newly returned to her childhood environs in the Faraways, is reading the historical romances of dead Fellowes Kraft one after another to see her through the hard realities of a divorce. There is another history in Kraft's vivid novels; there are angels and Elizabethan magicians and the boy Shakespeare; once upon a time these tales entranced Pierce Moffett too, and teased him with the traces of a very large story indeed....