Forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities after being abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army, Ugandan teen Esther struggles to survive and escape before crossing paths with Jane, an American journalist who has traveled to Africa to advocate on behalf of children like Esther.

Ann Lord, ill, and only vaguely conscious of what is going on around her, travels back in her mind to the memory of a summer weekend forty years earlier when she fell in love.

"A superb collection of short fiction--her first in thirty years and spanning many geographies--from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through protests in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril;...