In illuminating issues of love and loss, desire and fear, many of these stories focus upon women characters: Catherine, who discovers her husband is having an affair; Rusty, who is dealing with the aftermath of a horrific shark attack during a family vacation; Emily, who tends bar and is convinced that she will never love and be loved; an old woman whose husband dies in the night beside her; a young woman who convinces her sixteen-year-old lover to murder her husband. In four of the stories we meet LuAnn Arceneaux, through whom Dubus works out a vision of growing wisdom about life's precarious blessings. Dubus's male characters are equally absorbing: a confused adolescent boy whose fantasies bring disaster; a Vietnam veteran whose love affair ends when his lover seeks an abortion; a quadriplegic whose tale of skydiving illuminates an extraordinary evening among a group of people in a bar. To all of these stories, Dubus brings an intensely compassionate realism and an ethical, even spiritual, vision rarely seen in American culture today.