THE HIGH PLACES

THE HIGH PLACES is a collection of fourteen scintillating short stories: surprising, wise, thought-provoking, and superbly wrought. Ranging in setting from Australia to Greece, England to a Pacific Island, they focus on people: their hopes, fears, dreams and disappointments, and their relationships. All zoom in on life's unknowable points, strange moments around which fortune turns, making superb use of ambiguity and foible. In "Mycenae," McFarlance describes a middle-aged couple's disastrous vacation with old friends. In "Good News for Modern Man," a scientist lives on a small island with only a colossal squid and the ghost of Charles Darwin for company. And in the title story, and Australian farmer turns to Old Testament methods to relieve a fatal drought. The collection dissects the feelings - longing, contempt, love, fear - that animate our existence and hints at a reality beyond the smallness of our lives.

A Stepanie Cabot book for The Gernert Company.