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The year is 1871. Timid Milton Radcliffe is an art collector with a curious gift: He can "step inside" a painting and enter the artist's mind. In this manner he visits the lovely Lorien, depicted in pastoral works by her artist-husband, Jonathan Larking. Milton is devastated when a gallery fire on his London estate destroys the only painting of her that he owns.Discovering Larking's private journal, Milton learns that a life-size sculpture of Lorien exists in the couple's old summer retreat, somewhere in the Devonshire landscape already familiar to him through the destroyed painting. To find the statue, Milton must puzzle out the exact location of real-life "Larking Land" while circumventing deliciously Dickensian unscrupulous contemporaries as well as fantastical medieval apparitions rooted in his boyhood fears of falling off the world.He is joined in this expedition by Heather, described in Larking's diary as a little girl. Now grown to a beautiful young opera singer whose voice has mysteriously disappeared, Heather cannot lead Milton to "Larking Land" until she confronts and defeats malevolent forces emanating from the labyrinthine passages of a dilapidated theater. Milton and Heather's journey becomes a magical quest through the luminous and darker sides of the Victorian imagination.
