The Solitudes

Blurb

The Solitudes is a 1987 Modern Fantasy novel by John Crowley. It is Crowley's fifth published novel and the first novel in the four-volume Ægypt Sequence. The novel follows Pierce Moffett, a college history professor in his retreat from ordinary, academic life to pastoral life of Faraway Hills. While in the area, Pierce comes up with a plan to write a book about Hermeticism, in the process finding several parallels with his own project and that of the nearly-forgotten local novelist Fellowes Kraft.
The novel takes place in two time periods and features three main protagonists; that of Pierce's in the late twentieth century, and that of John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno as from the historical novels of Kraft in the Renaissance. The difference is marked stylistically by dashes indicating dialogue for events that happened in the Renaissance and events in the twentieth century marked by dialogue in quotation marks.
The novel was nominated for the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 1988 World Fantasy Award.