Who most deeply affects our lives? Sometimes it is those who touch us briefly, even unexpectedly. For May Nilsson, these include the lover she takes in her forties; the handsome, troubled young rebel she is determined to rescue; the police officer who inadvertently plays a major role in her greatest catastrophe. Moving back and forth in time, from May's childhood to her eighth decade, SEVEN LOVES weaves together the strands of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the complex passions that drive it.

Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a painting. Two men talk to each other and before long the writer -someone like them, one of them- begins to address us. Thus commences the fugue that is Beauty on Earth, in which the coming of a beautiful orphan to her uncle's inn brings a gradual chaos upon his town. Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz published La Beaute in 1927. This translation by Michelle Bailat-Jones is a gift for which English language readers have waited decades.

From the author of Seven Loves comes this austere, passionately shaped collection of stories that courageously explores the dynamic nature of modern marriage, the life-shattering heartbreak that often accompanies its collapse, and the fickle way in which the boundaries between us can be broken, erased, and newly defined.

At her daughter's wedding, an alcoholic widow finds a new beginning when she is swept off her feet by the bride's former secret lover. A man finds himself in a position of terrible power when he discovers his ex-wife's boyfriend with another woman. A woman who...

In the epigraph to this volume, Penelope Fitzgerald tells us: "If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching," and so we discover each story here to follow the arc of a search, just as each also contains a rescue. What is immediately apparent is that it will be impossible to guess the form this rescue will take or even who it is who'll require it.

Instead, the astonishingly talented Valerie Trueblood has imbued each story with its own depth and mystery, so rescue comes as a surprise to the reader, who is in intimate sympathy for the soul in extremity. And these are diverse...