Publisher's Synopsis
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 the Hagengard, a place where reality is a plural endeavor by its inhabitants. "Poetic and philosophical, The Nightingale's Stone draws us into an unreal but true place and time, where questions of being, both metaphorical and physiological, are riddled by miners, monsters, and scribes. Mecklenburg's territory-the Free and Hanseatic City of Hagen; the northern unyielding mountain mining town, Visingotha; and beyond-draws its borders across rivers of ancient fable, pushing the boundaries of contemporary magical realism, with characters that continue to speak after their tales are told and their fearsome countenances drawn." -Shannon Borg
