FIN is a near magical tale with a deft comic touch, composed of three inter-related novellas (THE MANDALA SOCIETY, PAVANNE FOR THE SELFISH GENE, and THE DINNER PARTY) with recurring, vividly real characters and Fin, named after the American five dollar bill, as the common, unifying narrator. He is a wealthy Canadian idler claiming, for lack of better, to be an amateur theologian ("never been proven wrong") while traveling the U.S. and the wilder shores of love with varying results. He explores San Francisco and its elites, a Vermont academic world featuring murder most foul and the Lake...

Four Americans venture deep into the Moroccan Sahara, hoping to find a celebrity holy man named Calvin Bild. Lara, a middle-aged professional beauty, her troubled son Eric, her lover Wally, and their would-be mascot, a Hollywood composer rightly known as Judas, self-confessed producer of music-like noises, step warily away from the civilization they know into a blinding landscape of uncertain possibility. Once found, Calvin Bild turns out to be a cheerful old West Point man, a physician of unusual warmth and even more unusual artistic powers. And out in the Sahara, when the seekers of their...