In the darkness the present lost its hold and the past, stirring in its sleep, turned its face to me and whispered a name.

Amaryllis Night and Day follows one man into the roots of love in a tender and unsettling journey of intermingling dream and memory. Successful painter Peter Diggs is pulled into the dreams--and secret life--of Amaryllis, a mysterious and beautiful woman with a desperate link to his past. As he struggles to resist or understand their deepening connection, he finds himself more and more disrupted by the shifting floors of reality and illusion, and ever more uncertain of what lies ahead. Where the book attempts furtive reaches into the unfamiliar, it stumbles into the queer compromise of allusion. Where it attempts to dislodge conventions, it drops into an affected discord of peripheral detail. Where it succeeds, however, is in the author's impressive ability to withdraw, to relax his grip and allow the pervasive incompleteness to remain undefined; and to ride the strange crude wave until it breaks.

As is true of Hoban's other works--Turtle Diary, The Medusa Frequency, Angelica's Grotto, to name a few--the intricate story is not pressed or jerked out, but seems to quietly rise from the dream fog. Love and unusual meetings, improbable surfaces and shimmering paradoxes, fears and apparitions, curious irritations and a very real sensitivity combine to make Amaryllis Night and Day a minor masterpiece. --Michael Kedda