In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s ‘talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,’ and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (‘Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets’) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (‘I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute’), while the title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had ‘no gift for flirtation’ with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and ‘queen of bad influences,’ as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania. With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious, and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.
