While working in a small geological museum, Alexis Hartz meets his cousin Laura, who has discovered a way to enter a geode. Travelling through a vast and glittering landscape of brilliant crystals, Alexis passionately falls in love with Laura, but, when they return to the ordinary world, only friendship remains. He yearns for the perfect world of the crystals, and returning there becomes a perilous obsession. But is the crystal world as real as it seems or is his mind playing tricks on him? Written in 1864 and published in a new translation by Sue Dyson, this little-known work by George Sand is a fantastical novel, in the truest sense of the word: a strange and compelling tale with echoes of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Conan Doyle’s Lost World and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.