Finalist Multicultural Literature: Dan Poynter's 2012 Global Ebook Awards.Modeled roughly on Malcolm Lowry's "Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid," this novel is part homage to Lowry and Hermann Hesse, part mushroom retrospective, and part middle-aged love story. David Thompson (the protagonist in Norris's "Looking for the Summer") is an expatriate American teaching at a Japanese university and suffering from hepatitis C. His wife Kaori is recovering from cancer surgery. Feeling a strong sense of their own mortality, confusion about the significance of what they have done with their lives, and a need to escape the constrictions of their life in Japan, the two set out on a journey to Europe to retrace a path from David's adventurous youth and locate a German benefactor from the past. What lies ahead—a trip through the Magic Theater, a sudden death, an encounter with Lowry's ghost, and a descent into the Capuchin Crypt in Rome—will change their lives irrevocably.