monk--one of the White Friars--leads to a secret at the heart of London. Massive yet phantasmal doors lead to the Alsacia, a hidden world inhabited by great heroes of both history and fiction. Captivated, Moorcock rides as a highwayman and finds himself drinking in the company of all four Musketeers, though he misses his children and his increasingly-estranged wife. The Alsacia's dangerous politics come to a head just as Moorcock's wife divorces him, each catastrophe feeding on the other as two realities pull on the emotionally struggling writer. Part memoir, part adventure novel, The Whispering Swarm --the first book in The Sanctuary of the White Friars series--is both an evocation of a now- vanished London and the beginning of a new journey through the multiverse, created by a master of science fiction and fantasy.