Synopsis
Ordinary lives, lives that brush against us every day, that's Dubus territory. It's rendered in the unblinking realism for which he is famous, and which, in this collection of short fiction, focuses on the twisting deformations of love that police, with irony, call "domestic disturbances." Andre Dubus is a well established author whose beat is the Northeast. He knows it and its people, its nuances and problems. He writes with great honesty and conviction about people and their lives.
"...luminous with honesty and generosity. Dubus is interested in essential things--in the shadowy powers that circle our lives and in the slender resources of faith and love with which we try to keep them at bay." --Tobias Wolff
The New Yorker - John Updike
Mr. Dubus is a shrewd student of people who come to accept pain as a fair price for pleasure, and to view right and wrong as a matter of degree; without moralizing, he suggests that their self—inflicted punishments are often worse that what a just court, or a just God, would decree.