Reminiscent of works such as Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" or Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." A novella of multiple perspectives, fantasies, transforming identities, past and present. During the Interregnum, a foundling named Jordan sets sail to explore the world, discover new fruits, find love, find himself; back in England, his adopted mother -- an impossibly massive creature known only as the Dog-Woman -- brutalizes hypocritical Puritans and longs for the presence of her son, the only person with whom she has ever shared love. The book is airy, fantastical, often confusing in its blurring of reality, fantasy, internal and external worlds; it starts to fall apart, I think, when a modern story is juxtaposed with the historical fiction. Perhaps others will find the mixture of these two stories more compelling, but for me, it caused the work to teeter over the edge: it had been barely held together by the threads of dream logic and imagination, but the temporal disjunction just made it a bit too frayed for me. Still, a beautiful, poetic work for the most part.