On an island in Maine, two men of the cloth - a Bishop and a disgraced former priest - conduct an investigation into the disappearance of a young priest. As his story is recounted, we see the young priest, Edmond, and a parishioner, Sheila, meet. Sheila wants Riley, her eleven-year-old son who has Canavan's disease, to receive communion. Edmond tries to educate a child considered incapable of communication. As Edmond becomes more involved with Sheila and Riley, he begins to question his religious and human role. In need of her own spiritual guidance and companionship, Sheila challenges...

With this collection of stories, Anthony Giardina takes his place among the finest writers of short fiction in America.

The Country of Marriage is a window into the lives of men as they confront the darkness at the heart of domestic existence. Giardina looks at our relationships with an eye capable of clinical precision but never devoid of compassion, and gives voice to the emotions that lie unexplored and unexpressed beneath their seemingly placid surface.

In "Days with Cecilia," a highly articulate shop teacher reveals by attrition the sexual secret of his marriage....

Richie Palumbo, the most ordinary of men, gets lost one night in 1969 while driving with his family. He finds himself in Norumbega--a gorgeous, hidden town on the far edges of Boston's western suburbs. He sees a venerable old house and, without quite knowing why, decides that he must have it. Richie's wild dream sets his family on a forty-year odyssey in which they confront class and parental dreams, sex and spirituality, and the way hopes conflict with reality. Anthony Giardina's Norumbega Park is a brilliant, sensuous drama of suburban angst--a novel that mines the depths of desire...

At an elite women's college in Massachusetts, two minor crises emerge during the fall semester: the philandering head of the English Department decides to callously end his affair with a colleague, and an aging professor is caught making unwanted sexual advances toward a student. But in the academic world of the early 21st century, there is no such thing as a minor crisis. For Jacob Freundlich, an English professor approaching middle age, the sudden necessity of making moral choices, rather than just teaching books about them, leads him into a devastating midlife crisis of his own. A comedy...