The protagonists in this eight-story offering are floundering and out of options. A tempest approaches, a reckoning overdue. They include a reform school incorrigible; a small-town newspaper editor in the dying days of print; a young backpacker finding kinship and renewal on a tropical isle; a Second World War veteran and the girl he can’t forget; a South Asian immigrant’s side hustle; mature women, husbands gone and kids scattered, and a support group like no other; a rejected novelist confronting an embittered publisher; and, in the final yarn, the collection’s caboose, three friends on a road trip to Mexico, and the mysterious hitchhiker who tags along.

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