In his first collection, a master storyteller focuses on a fresh and fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, Richard Russo here captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority. As with all his characters, these newcomers appeal to us almost despite themselves. A jaded Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a decades-old flame he never knew he'd harbored; a precocious fifth-grader puzzles over life, love, and baseball as he watches his parents' marriage dissolve; another child is forced into a harrowing cross-country escape; an elderly couple rediscovers the power-and misery-of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a resort island; and in the title story, a septuagenarian nun invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga.

After the triumph of EMPIRE FALLS, Richard Russo now extends his versatility and accomplishment as he demonstrates once again that "there is a big, wry heart beating at the center of Russo's fiction" (The New Yorker).