A Message for Mr. Lazarus

From an old house with gingerbread in Vancouver - where it is possible to tell the days of the week by the smells drifting from the chocolate factory in the basement - to Dresden before the fire-storm, Nicaragua during the time of the Sandinistas, these stories take us to places where our senses can expand. In a house by the sea, a woman struggles to discover her lover's secret thoughts. A ferry ride in Canada is taken by an unfaithful wife. A failed hero contemplates a final deadly game at harvest time. Characters who live in the grip of forces they cannot control - cravings, jealousies, obsessions, private terrors - look for truth, which lies in wait in dark, seductive places. In the prize-winning novella "A Message for Mr. Lazarus", a man flees to a remote hideaway in Costa Rica. He keeps nodding off to sleep, then jerking up again. And every time he does that - lets his guard down - he is back in his BMW once again, screaming across the plain of Guanacaste, refusing to be passed even on blind corners, which is how they drive here, everything dry, smoke-hazed, the mountains in the east shimmering like dreams; and flame trees flashing by, and herds of thin white cattle, and now and then a palm, and in every little village he has to slow for pageants of the Crucifixion ... In a small hotel he remembers as the most beautiful place in the world, the man remains "dogged by luck" and all his attempts at ironic self-deception will not keep him from an offer of redemption that he might have chosen to avoid.