When a body falls on to the roof of Tanya Sewell’s house in the middle of the night, the world’s media arrives, demanding answers. Tanya recognises the woman as her old friend, the literary researcher Catherine Richards, but where did she come from and how did she end up on Tanya’s roof?

 

The reporters move on, but Tanya is unable to, not least because she has inherited Catherine’s house, which is full of more books than Tanya could imagine any one person owning.

 

But there is another remarkable development, and Tanya finds herself caught up in a confusion of space and time, books and authors, fact and fiction, all of which seem to be the result of the mysterious Sixtystone, an artefact referred to in the fourteenth century by a third-century geographer, Solinus, and in the fiction of the nineteenth-century author Arthur Machen.

 

All copies of this novel signed by the author.

 

Cover images: T.J. Stephens

 

Buy the book direct from Tartarus Press

 

 

Reviews:

"The biographer of Robert Aickman and founding member of the Friends of Arthur Machen society has produced a modern, wonderfully strange story that admirers of both those earlier authors should love." Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian

 

"Deftly blends mystery with contemporary bibliophilia, snarky online discussion groups, hallucinatory time-slips and a pervasive sense of the uncanny." Michael Dirda, Washington Post

 

"It’s a real page-turner just to be around his enjoyable characters, and the supernatural overlay is the icing on the cake." Rick Kleffel, Narrative Species Blog/KSQD

 

"An exciting story that easily and elegantly expands genre boundaries." Gerrit Wustmann, Rocks