The opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, exemplified in struggles with a father, a friend, an enemy. In part two, Dubus contends with the military, the police, and fate--and then leaves us with the most wrenching of all emotional challenges in the final novella, Adultery. Poignant as parables, alive as fiction, and compelling as pure narrative, these familiar stories never fail to entertain while, at the same time, leaving the reader breathless with the immediacy and depth of real life in the real America.

    The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."

    A cross between Fielding´s Tom Jones and the story of Moses, Refiner´s Fire is a great and colorful adventure that ends in a crucible of battle, suffering, and death, from which Marshall Pearl rises purely by the grace of God. Addressing the holy and the profane, but never heavy handedly, it is not so much a meditation on the fate of the Jews after the Holocaust, the rise of Israel, and the spirit of America, as it is an elegy and a song in which the powers of life and regeneration are shown to gorgeous effect.

    Joanna and Ted Kramer, and four-year-old Billy—his big brown eyes bright with curiosity and wonder. A perfect family. Then on day the mother abandons them. Divorce. And now they are two. Father and son. Caring and cared for, learning what loving and belonging are all about, until there is a bond between them that nothing can break. Nothing and nobody—except maybe a mother who, almost two years later, changes her mind and wants her little boy back...

    published by Knopf, New York.

    Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," she has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.