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So you have read The Solitudes or (this is the same book) Aegypt, and you're wondering whether you'd like to read the other three books in this tetralogy (The Aegypt Cycle). So -- no spoilers -- here's what I can tell you:

Pierce Moffett and the people of Blackbury Jambs remain prominent in all four volumes, and the thread that runs from start to finish is Pierce's little life -- his flawed, sad, typical, and yet inspiring, often challenging, life as a flawed and ultimately redeemable, forgivable, human being.

However, we don't follow Pierce for decades, and we don't travel with him into his old age. I think of the tetralogy as being anchored to Pierce's midlife crisis -- although he's a bit younger than literal midlife, he's certainly having a crisis. He doesn't know why he's here, what his purpose is, what his direction should be. Around him he observes the people of this rural wayside where he has found himself stopping, almost by accident. He circles around and around a grand idea for a massive literary work centered on Aegypt -- a chimera, a parallel universe where magic was real, a world where people used to live and then -- and then? -- and this is all tangled up with the life's work of a dead author named Fellowes Kraft, whose house (and final manuscript) happen to be in the same village where Pierce is staying.

And what happens then? If this all sounds like I am describing the first of the four volumes, that's not surprising -- but I am also describing all four of them. The movement forward is tangible as you continue reading. Neither Pierce nor any of the other characters (including John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno) stands still for very long. Religion, science, magic, past and present flow in and out, currents of different temperatures but all part of one sea. Everything rushes toward a conclusion, like hurtling down a long, twisting tunnel (sometimes very dark) from which, in the end, all will burst out into the clean air again.

Circling and hurtling at once are, I think, good metaphors for the way this story travels toward its very satisfying conclusion. Along the way you'll find yourself smiling at the recurrences of dogs and roses, the numerous words containing the grapheme æ, the werewolves, the fairies, and angels.

So if you, my friend, would like me to tell you how it all ends -- I can't do that. It wouldn't make sense. You need to get on the raft along with Pierce and ride it through, because the experience is much more than the plot.