Many Kingdoms

Lawrence Varick has built his life on certainty: logic, practicality, and the firm ground of the waking world. Then the dreams begin. He finds himself walking through a foreign village he has never seen, its cobblestones wet with rain that falls only in sleep, its air thick with the scent of something he cannot name. And there, waiting in a doorway half-remembered from no life he has lived, is a woman whose face he will carry like a splinter beneath his skin. She speaks to him in a language he somehow understands. She knows him. She is waiting for him. When he wakes, the world seems thinner, less real than the kingdom he left behind. And so begins his descent into a question that will haunt every waking hour: What is the self that dreams? Elizabeth Garver Jordan crafts a meditation on longing and the boundaries of identity, a novel where love exists in a country with no map and no return ticket.