Startlingly original in conception, Crowley moves the reader back and forth through time while he tells a story with a complexity and skill reminiscent of John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Both Fowles and Crowley fuse historical figures and fictional ones while presenting the intellectual climate of an age, and both give special emphasis to the importance of place in their novels. At the end of Love & Sleep, Crowley includes an Author's Note in which he acknowledges a number of writers, among them Harry Caudill whose Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963) helped him craft the section on Pierce's youth in Kentucky; John Bossy, whose Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, along with Gerald Mattingly's The Armada (1959), and R. J. W. Evans's Rudolf II and His World, provided background on the sixteenth century; and loan Couliano, whose Eros and Magic in theRenaissance served as a source...