A young journalist and aspiring author MICHAEL ROBB has landed a dream assignment: to interview the renowned but reclusive author EDWARD GRANVILLE. The famous writer and his devoted wife VIRGINIA have lived for many years in isolation at their hilltop retreat on the Pacific Coast known as Stonecliff. Not long after Michael arrives, strange things begin to happen. Granville’s wife disappears, and Michael meets NINA, a beautiful but mysterious young woman who seems to be the author’s mistress. Other characters suddenly appear and then vanish into thin air as if they are creations from the author’s vivid imagination. Michael comes to realize that these hallucinations are in fact coming straight from the pages of Granville’s work and that he is becoming a character in the author’s next book. Robert Nathan weaves a mysterious and haunting story that echoes an Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece concerning a famous novelist’s life and all the secrets that lie behind the gates of his beloved home–Stonecliff.

“This is a daring accomplishment, yet characteristic of the courage and imagination which always mark Nathan’s work. If he is not the most neglected of our great writers, surely not enough readers have been initiated into the circle of his magic… This novel, as all enduring novels, may be read on every level from entertainment to prophecy. It will, I am certain, bring many new readers to this great storyteller, to find in his novels a world celebrating tenderness, love, mystery and the sorcery of the creative mind.”
–Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times