In 1975, Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person." For the next two years, she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice, death, and the will of God.

In Holy the Firm, she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, and about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things—rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.

This is a profound book about the natural world—both its beauty and its cruelty—that Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, knows so well.

Long ago, the wizards had vanished from the world, and all knowledge was left hidden in riddles. Morgon, prince of the simple farmers of Hed, proved himself a master of such riddles when he staked his life to win a crown from the dead Lord of Aum. But now ancient, evil forces were threatening him. Shape-changers began replacing friends until no man could be trusted. So Morgon was forced to flee to hostile kingdoms, seeking the High One who ruled from the mysterious Erlenstar Mountain. Beside him went Deth, the High One's Harper. Ahead lay strange encounters and terrifying adventures. And with him always was the greatest of unsolved riddles: the nature of the three stars on his forehead that seemed to drive him toward his ultimate destiny.