The Good People

Two women see something uncanny in the skies over west London in the summer of 1989.

It's the summer of 1989, a time of global flux just before the collapse of the Berlin wall and of South Africa's apartheid; a time of signs and portents…

Two women see something uncanny in the skies over west London.

Maeve, the wife of the local vicar, finds she has lost nearly an hour of her life. In search of this lost time, she uncovers the memory of an encounter with aliens and, worse, a mysterious event from her childhood in Ireland, which she finally redeems in the underworld of an IRA-connected pub…

Her husband Alistair has his own nightmare: preparations for the visit of an African bishop and his entourage for a Christian conference, whose left-wing agenda is threatened by the attendance of a famous and enigmatic nun…

Meanwhile, Heather's sighting comes as a revelation that leads her, like a questing Grail knight, through strange ordeals, from a menacing cult to an alternate reality; from a mental hospital to, finally, an encounter with her own hidden depths.

A companion volume to the author's critically lauded Daimonic Reality, a classic nonfiction study of otherworld journeys, The Good People is a modern fairy tale that dramatizes with wit the interweaving of revelation and delusion, the natural and the supernatural, worldliness and sanctity—ultimately suggesting that our humdrum lives are shadowed by the alien dimension of myth.

Patrick Harpur is the author of Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, a Study of Alchemy; The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination; and A Complete Guide to the Soul. He has also published three novels: The Serpent's Circle, The Rapture and, most recently, The Savoy Truffle, a highly autobiographical black comedy.