The Nightingale's Stone - David Mecklenburg

Between two hills was a decrepit hall. Of what manner of architecture had gone into its spirit and flesh, I could not tell. The profuse and overgrown garden around it--the wild apple trees that climbed and fought with one another--obscured its age and look. It was as if each step changed the hall, and the lengthening shadows hinted at its great age, a history spoken in a forgotten language." Ada Ludenow returns to the Harz Mountains of Germany where thirteen years earlier she experienced a love affair that threw her into the uncertainty of life. Hoping to find her lover from that time, she instead finds a hungry but inquisitive supernatural being who may or may not eat her. To forestall becoming his dinner, she tells him of the summer of her twenty-seventh birthday and how it opened the road to Elsewhere. With twenty-one illustrations by the author, The Nightingale's Stone is the first novel set in the world of Hagengard, a place where reality is a plural endeavor by its inhabitants.