Carefully crafted, emotionally acute, grounded in the grit and courage of human lives, the 22 tales in this 232-page volume probe life's crisis moments and its lustrous ordinary hours.

"Damn well written. These are sharp stories; they pierce one's heart"--Helen Chuckrow, author, Interpreting the Bible with Chutzpah

"Deeply personal, exquisite tales, moments of both sublime beauty and grave peril in the protagonists' lives"--Jeremy Lichtman, author, Alien Puzzle Boxes

"Dancing close to autobiography, these well-written stories burn from the page"--Richard Bunning, author, Spider World and other fictions

Among the stories:

• a mountain encounter wakes a veteran's numbed feelings;
• two French Resistance fighters must balance desperate action and raw love;
• a 1960s activist finds personal and political identity;
• a single mother's love struggles against terror;
• dying, an elder seeks some shred of meaning;
• a detained immigrant child fights to remember her mother;
• so far, they had outwitted each pandemic.