Gray Riding lives in a black-and-white world bedeviled by certainty. Punishment follows wrongdoing, subordinates obey authority, death is the consequence of illness. Cordelia Líoht lives a nuanced life. Her mother suffers from a condition that the best doctors in Europe cannot relieve. She writes air-mail letters and delights in the complexity of mazes, maps, and dreams. When Gray meets Cordelia, will the world as they know it change forever? Set in 1931, Riding ventures from the claustrophobic world of a boys’ boarding school to the dizzying atmosphere of the Continent between the wars. Cold dormitories, Yorkshire rain, London theater, Parisian salons, German spas, Irish wellsprings, English summers, and the hearts of the people abiding there. A vanished world, restored in vividness. Living as we do, so much better than our grandparents, in our best of all possible worlds, what could we possibly require from theirs, imperfect and closing in on cataclysm?

The electric conclusion of the story begun in volume one. England, 1931. Cordelia Líoht is poised to leave for America, seeking a high-risk cure for her mother’s mysterious illness. Gray Riding anxiously awaits the return of her letters as he avoids confrontation with Morgan Wilberforce and the past they shared. John Grieves seeks relief from intolerable frustration, unable to rescue Cordelia’s mother, the love of his life; battered by the past, which accuses him in flash photographs, scourging him for his failures. As the year grows old and the days grow short, is the world as they know it about to pass away? And what of the world as it is known to itself?