Professor of modern literature Harold Miller discovers that some love affairs can last forever. Miller wrote a biography of the reclusive poet-novelist R.J. Hyatt, a veteran of World War I. In his day, Robert Jonas Hyatt was an immensely popular fantasist whose only published novel, The Land of Dust and Honey, was a long, dense exploration into an alternate world discovered by a soldier of The Great War and a young girl from a different century. Miller devoted his life to studying and critiquing Hyatt’s novel, and is widely considered an expert on it. Despite his successes, the aging Harold Miller faces several obstacles in his life. For one, his adult daughter Elinor Miller, a professor of anthropology, is convinced that her father is suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. His editor Schuyler Heddings informs him that unless he uncovers some new material-preferably Hyatt’s legendary ‘lost’ novel manuscript-Miller’s biography on the writer will go out of print. And May Weldon, Hyatt’s literary executor, despises Miller for reasons dating back many years.

With some trepidation, Miller returns to visit May at her home in Haverford Township, Pennsylvania. There the scholar learns firsthand how Hyatt came to invent the world depicted in The Land of Dust and Honey. May Weldon also has another surprise in store for the professor, the kind men like Harold Miller dream about. But will Miller remember?