His name is Caspar Last, and this is the unique chronicle of the vacation he took from the twentieth century.

It begins - or does it? - when Caspar, a genius, poor of course, and resentful at that, decides to use his "time machine" to bring back a modest fortune. It begins - or maybe it doesn''t - with a mysterious bequest to a secret Otherhood charged with preserving and extending the British Empire at any cost.

From the bold colonial days of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes through the wide-eyed and wondrous possibilities of the present to a strange and haunting future of magi and angels, of men and many races other than our own, John Crowley''s time-travel masterpiece surfs bravely along "the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of Time" to tell a story that takes place neither here nor there, but everywhen.