He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face....

Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare's present.