Montana, Wyoming, and the Trinity Alps of northern California are the landscapes of these elegant, rough-hewn narratives where people yearn for grace even as their chances are running out. "Roy Parvin has a sense of what people will do when they have reached their particular limits," says Charles Baxter, "and these wonderful tales are like visions." A recently paroled ex-con tries to outrun a violent past. An out-of-work logger finds an unexpected kind of love. And a woman's journey by rail through a western snowscape becomes a bittersweet tale of redemption.