First published 2013
An elderly couple decides to shoplift, unleashing decades of buried memories. Adolescent cousins discover unexpected love. A young girl keeps a dangerous secret about her forbidden meeting with the tsar in a Russian forest. A wealthy family's child faces peril at a strange European inn filled with outcasts. These moments unfold across continents and generations, from Jerusalem's ancient streets to Central America's heat, from tsarist Russia's grandeur to London under bombardment, from central Europe's upheaval to Manhattan's energy, from Maine's rocky coast to the fictional Boston suburb of Godolphin, Massachusetts. Each character confronts choices that reveal the tender brutality of being human. The stories move between cultures and decades, showing how people reach across distance and time to find each other. Love arrives when least expected. Memory surfaces in moments of crisis. Strangers become family. Family becomes strange. Through thirty-four tales drawn from four decades of work, these interconnected lives reveal the small rituals and vast longings that bind us together.
Genres: literary-fiction, family-life, 20th-century, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate
Tropes: found-family, interconnected-lives
Setting: Jerusalem, Central America, Russia, London, Central Europe, Manhattan, Maine, Godolphin
Period: Tsarist Russia, World War II
418 pages · Paperback · Pushkin Press