At the foot of the Crowbury Plain lies the remote hamlet of Ashmore, the image of perfect, rustic escape. And so it seems to Anna, beating a strategic retreat from a doomed love affair and a failed career in the city. But beneath the idyllic surface a complex web of dreams and fates lie intertwined, trapped in the twist of wild roads that surround the village, caught in the very bones of the earth.
For Anna is returning to rejoin a perilously unresolved eternal triangle; to be reunited with her lover of age past, and the woman who seeks to keep him, body and soul, to herself. The serenity of Ashmore is about to be disrupted, for cats and humans alike: for Anna's return is about to revive an ancient pattern, and set loose . . . the Dream.
When humans sleep, they dream. In the deepest hour of the night, their wild impulses awaken and take on the life they crave. As dreams they steal out into the darkness and onto the animal highways, the wild roads. Some are as pale and golden as a new autumn leaf. But some are darker and nastier, and these are the dreams that will burn themselves into the fabric of the wild roads. Where the roads are convoluted, they will do their worst damage; and Ashmore lies in an intrication of highways. Dreams here never die: unless they are disposed of. In every generation of cats in Ashmore one is born whose designated task it is to patrol the wild roads, there to follow the scurrying fragments of human fantasies and nightmares: to hunt and pounce and catch and eat the dreams that might otherwise poison the world: The Dreamcatcher.
