The Ægypt Cycle

Series · 4 books · 1987-2007

By John Crowley

Books in series

Ægypt

1987

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… Pierce is on the track of a history he can’t quite believe in; Rosie is losing her place in her own story, forgetting why people love one another. They are two seekers, marked by loss, about to share a discover in Fellowes Kraft’s old house in the Faraway Hills. There is more than one history of the world.

Love & Sleep

1994

Pierce Moffett stands at a turning point, when the world is changing from what it has been into what it will be. Is it only a moment in the history of his own soul? Or the course of his generation's progress toward maturity? As a child Pierce was no stranger to magic. Transplanted from his native Brooklyn to the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky, he and his cousins formed a secret club called the Invisible College. Fueled by books, adventures, and the imagination of youth, they scratched the surface of ordinary life and found the hints of something glittering and strange underneath. For most children these revelations fade with the coming of adulthood, but for Pierce the search for the hidden history of the world is just beginning. It is a search that begins with the unfinished manuscript of a writer named Fellowes Kraft and leads to the real-life history of the doomed heretic Giordano Bruno and the Elizabethan metaphysician John Dee. These mysteries reach from past to present, to intertwine themselves with the life of Rosie Rasmussen, who brought Pierce that unfinished manuscript and will be given charge of Pierce's destiny. And as he delves deeper, Pierce begins to apprehend a power beyond reckoning, a knowledge beyond imagining, and a love that can waken sleeping souls. Only rarely does an author emerge with the vision, the voice, and the courage to speculate on the alchemy that transforms the everyday into something transcendent. Crowley opened the gates to this feared and desired land in his magnificent novel AEgypt. Now he leads us far within.

Dæmonomania

2000

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, another path unfolds: she’s drawn into a cult that promises to exorcise her demons. 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. A great cycle of time is ending, and Pierce and Rosie, Samantha and Rose Ryder must take sides in an age-old war that is approaching the final battle…Or is it? Dæmonomania 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

2007

Praise for the Aegypt sequence: "A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique."-The New York Times Book Review "A master of language, plot, and characterization."-Harold Bloom "The further in you go, the bigger it gets."-James Hynes "The writing here is intricate and thoughtful, allusive and ironic... Aegypt bears many resemblances, incidental and substantive, to Thomas Pynchon's wonderful 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49."-USA Today "An original moralist of the same giddy heights occupied by Thomas Mann and Robertson Davies."-San Francisco Chronicle This is the fourth novel-and much-anticipated conclusion-of John Crowley's astonishing and lauded Aegypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffitt, the Aegypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other. John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine. His most recent novel is Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. He teaches 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 of his work is still in print.

Author

John Crowley

Author · 29 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information. John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was 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 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. 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. His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation. Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)