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 is 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.