From Colm T ib n, 'one of the world's best living literary writers' (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America--about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love. Celebrated as 'his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power' (Los Angeles Times), Colm T ib n is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras. In 'The Journey to Galway,' a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. 'Sleep,' originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story,