It is a fictional treatment of the early life and troubled relationships of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, became a foundational figure of German Romanticism.

First published in hardback by Flamingo, the novel became the first paperback title offered by Mariner Books, then a new imprint of Houghton Mifflin.

[4] It covers the years from 1790 to 1797 when von Hardenberg was a student of history, philosophy and law at the universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg, and before he embarked on his professional life.

[6] At the end of Fitzgerald's earlier novel The Bookshop, a faded blue gentian is mentioned as having been pressed into one of two books.

In another novel, The Beginning of Spring, Selwyn rhapsodizes about the "blue stream flowing gently over our heads", an unattributed quotation from Novalis.