John Davis has a dull aching sense of missing out, of not getting anywhere. There must be millions like him, he thinks. His relations with his wife, Serena, are shallow and unsatisfying. In the late 1930s, he tries to rekindle their marriage by bringing her to a special place from his past the Montana mountains. He is chagrined when she asks other people to join them on the camping trip. Plans are further disrupted by a catastrophe a forest fire that rages uncontrolled for three days. Forced to reach outward to others in this crisis, the members of the party ultimately have to face themselves...

Deirdre McNamer has won praise for the intelligence, beauty, precision, and breadth of her fiction. This beautifully crafted, far-ranging novel of idealism laid waste and the haunting, redemptive bonds of friendship tells the story of three Montana men--brothers Aidan and Neil Tierney, and their friend Roland Taliaferro--who get swept up in the machinations of World War II and its fateful aftermath. After the war, Aidan returns to Montana ill and emotionally shattered from the war, and on a cold December day in 1946 is found fatally shot, an apparent suicide. Only when Neil and Roland are...