Consisting of four accounts of encounters with four male characters, each of them visited by a different Christopher Isherwood, and each set in a different time and place - Berlin in the 1920s (overlapping the time period of the Berlin Stories), the Greek Isles in the early 1930s, London in the late 1930s and California in 1940 - this acclaimed novel explores Isherwood's fundamental concerns with the choice of a way of life, and its implications for love, sex, spirituality and self-fulfillment.

Published in 1959, when Isherwood had already become something of a literary rock star, Down There on a Visit a very funny but also sad and deeply personal book that charts Isherwood's life of carnal indulgence and his first interlude with what would become a serious involvement with Eastern mysticism.