Sergeant Raymond Shaw returns home from the Korean War to an uproarious welcome from the press and his fellow Americans. Little does anyone realize, not even Shaw himself, that Communist conspirators have planted a secret trigger in his unconscious mind that is intended to allow them to use him as an assassin.

Mary Beth Latham is first and foremost a mother, whose three teenaged children come first, before her career as a landscape gardener, or even her life as the wife of a doctor. Caring for her family and preserving their everyday life is paramount. And so, when one of her sons, Max, becomes depressed, Mary Beth becomes focused on him, and is blindsided by a shocking act of violence.

If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son. Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden. But with a single phone call, everything changes. Your mother... she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. She's had a psychotic breakdown, and been committed to a mental hospital. Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother...

Drover C. Dog, faithful sidekick to Hank the Cowdog, tells the story of his life, from being the runt of the litter with dreams of being a handsome prince, to how he came to Loper and Sally May's ranch.

When Chester the raccoon is reluctant to go to kindergarten for the first time, his mother teaches him a secret way to carry her love with him.

Well-versed in the natural healing properties of herbs and oils, Jennie Pickett longs to become a doctor. But the Oregon frontier of the 1870s doesn't approve of such innovations as women attending medical school. To support herself and her young son, Jennie cares for an elderly woman. When her patient dies, Jennie discovers that her heart has become entangled with the woman's widowed husband, a man many years her senior. Their unlikely romance will...

As London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place. The story traces fear and wonder as the baby grows, thriving and content against all the odds.

"Eight-year-old Edgar Fini remembers nothing of the accident people still whisper about. He only knows that his father is gone, his mother has a limp, and his grandmother believes in ghosts. When Edgar meets a man with his own tragic story, the boy begins a journey into a secret wilderness where nothing is clear: not even the line between the living and the dead. In order to save her son, Lucy has no choice but to confront the demons of her past."--Amazon.com....

When his mother dies, thirty-eight-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.

A collection of thirty-one short stories by Tobias Wolff that span the last twenty-five years of his career, featuring characters experiencing the ordinary and extraordinary events of everyday life.