A jar that holds your deepest secrets and fears. A fireman confronts his past while trying to save a group of children who have fallen through thin ice. A preacher's daughter goes to fantastic and desperate lengths to write a book like Mark Twain. A man who cures people's pain and sadness through laughter finds his greatest challenge in a little boy. In this debut collection by Paul G. Tremblay, there are twenty stories following the chronological arc of a human life. Twenty stories about the young and old, and everyone in-between.

A jar that holds your deepest secrets and fears. A fireman confronts his past while trying to save a group of children who have fallen through thin ice. A preacher's daughter goes to fantastic and desperate lengths to write a book like Mark Twain. A man who cures people's pain and sadness through laughter finds his greatest challenge in a little boy. In this debut collection by Paul G. Tremblay, there are twenty stories following the chronological arc of a human life. Twenty stories about the young and old, and everyone in-between.

Above: City is sprawling, technocratic, corrupt, and built hundreds of feet above a bay, resting upon the giant wooden shoulders of Pier. Below: Pier is a seemingly endless maze of stripped sequoia trees with trunks as thick as buildings, branches molded into a complex lattice of support beams and struts. Above and Below: The people. Weapons dealers and hired heavies with major Daddy-issues; a Pier-deported homeless man and a pistol packing priest trying to survive with each other and their terrible secrets; a librarian haunted by City's violent history, his family, and by Balloons; a flawed...