"A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author Elizabeth Tenant 0Ì3 and what appear to be the remains of a child. Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intrigued by what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But things become even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written a hundred years before their time. Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novel Mirage. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal0Ì9s secrets. As time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, it becomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not. And why can0Ì9t he shake the feeling that he0Ì9s been to the village before?"--Back cover.