Crowe is solitary and isolated, out on a limb in his rural environment, and just as uneasy in the university town he eventually ends up in. Inspired by his grandfather, a solitary, harrowed visionary, he transforms his surroundings into the stuff of legend, making himself a kind of warlock's apprentice, a keeper of secrets. This mythologising takes over his life giving it drama, edge and a bleak beauty. He meets a girl on a city street and falls in love, but then he allows his heart to be stopped in a paid experiment, and death enters in . . .
A haunting novel, brilliantly balanced between fantasy and realism.
