The Transformation

One morning Guy Sebring wakes up to discover he has become Alcestis, the woman he loves. In the course of fifteen hours between 9 o'clock and midnight, he enters a series of relationships with mysterious androgynes—the cigar-smoking Lord Peter, who likes only boys, and the pilot Madeleine, the archetypal bi-sexual woman who prefers her own kind; through them, he is reconciled to his new identity before gradually returning to what he was before, an Austrian gentleman between the wars.

During the day the date of the action fluctuates from the belle epoque to the late 1930s, and the scene likewise shifts from a small country house outside a central European town to an Edwardian liner to a zeppelin before finally returning to the country house again. Time moves, identities change, and the world remains the same.