Prologue -- Enchantment -- The magician -- Portcullis -- Enceinte -- Moat -- Battlements -- Pitch -- Buttresses -- Le mistral -- The knight -- Oubliette -- The fortress -- The white queen -- Epilogue.

The story of Trussoni's marriage to a brilliant, mysterious novelist from Bulgaria. The author of the novels Falling Through the Earth and Angelology returns with a memoir of love and transformation in France, a gorgeously written account of one woman's journey to the other side of the romantic fairytale. "If I had been another woman, I might have been skeptical. But I wasn<'t another woman. I was a woman ready to be swept away. I was a woman ready for her story to begin. As a writer, story was all that mattered. Rising action, dramatic complication, heroes and villains and dark plots. I believed I was the author of my life, that I controlled the narration." From their first kiss, twenty-seven-year-old writer Danielle Trussoni is spellbound by a novelist from Bulgaria. The two share a love of jazz and books and travel, passions that intensify their whirlwind romance. Eight years later, hopeful to renew their marriage, Danielle and her husband move to the south of France, to a picturesque medieval village in the Languedoc. It is here, in a haunted stone fortress built by the Knights Templar, that she comes to understand the dark, subterranean forces that have been following her all along. While Danielle and her husband eventually part, Danielle's time in the fortress brings precious wisdom about life and love that she could not have learned otherwise. An incisive look at romantic love, The Fortress is one woman's fight to understand the complexities of her own heart.