Book excerpt: Grey Magic is a work of great scope and stylistic virtuosity, combining antic humor with immense sophistication, an Anglo-American setting with an Anglo-European sensibility and a profound insight into contemporary issues of both personal and collective resonance. It is also an account of a would-be sorcerer's aspirations to 'Fausthood', a passionate love story and a tale of revenge exacted through a curse. Like its author, the narrator and protagonist of this semi-autobiographical novel is born and educated in the States but expatriates himself to Britain in his early thirties.