This novel of the sequence is sectioned based on the first three astrological houses. The project of a long uncompleted work on Bruno has many similarities to The Last Confession by Morris West. On his blog, Crowley identified Kraft as an 'intentional creation' who nevertheless resembles how Crowley imagines Stacton 'if he'd lived to be old'. Kraft has been widely speculated to be based on the life and work of David Derek Stacton, of whom Crowley is a notable admirer, though Stacton is never known to have written on the subjects of either John Dee or Bruno. His novels are known for their interesting sources, but Rosie finds in them colour and style with little driving force to illustrate their histories, and Pierce finds too simplistic in their settings, but a useful starting point in illuminating the minds of their subjects. Kraft, on the other hand, is a historical novelist native to Blackberry Jambs in whose novels Pierce first reads about Giordano Bruno, and whose uncompleted novel about John Dee and Bruno meeting is interspersed throughout the novel. Barr's theories are likely based on the speculative historians Crowley cites in his short note at the beginning of the novel, which names the work of Robert Graves, the nearly forgotten Pre-Raphaelite Katharine Emma Maltwood, and especially Dame Frances Yates, who Crowley cites as a deliberate influence, calling the novel a 'fantasia on her themes'.

Pierce's two main sources for the book include the work of his graduate professor and speculative historian Frank Walker Barr, and the highly productive historical novelist Fellowes Kraft. The novel is structured basically as a künstlerroman ('artist's novel'), following the late-life development of Pierce Moffett in his attempts to finish a fictional book combining speculative history, fiction and a fictional world he created as a child called Ægypt. Clarke Award, and the 1988 World Fantasy Award. The novel was nominated for the 1988 Arthur C. 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 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.

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 follows Pierce Moffett, a college history professor in his retreat from ordinary, academic life to pastoral life of Faraway Hills. It is Crowley's fifth published novel and the first novel in the four-volume Ægypt series. The Solitudes (originally titled Ægypt contrary to Crowley's wishes ) is a 1987 modern fantasy novel by John Crowley.

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