In settings that range from small town Illinois to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, this title includes stories that are distinguished by the author's inimitable wisdom and kindness, his sense of the small details that make up a life, and the nuances of joy and sadness that change its direction.

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again.

The path to adulthood is littered with broken relationships. In the suburbs of 1920s Chicago two boys form an unlikely friendship. Spud Latham is slow at school but quick to fight and a natural athlete - Lymie Peters, thin, pigeon-chested and terrible at games, is devoted to him. As they graduate from school to college, tensions start to surface. It is Lymie who first meets Sally Forbes, but it is Spud she falls in love with. This signals the end of their friendship and the rift is almost more than Lymie can bear.

It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war-battered, and their reception at the Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open-hearted Americans could wish for.

From a writer who has become a contemporary legend for his flawless observation of forgotten American lives comes a wryly funny yet deeply compassionate novel of a small Illinois town in the early years of this century.

Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman. Yet to eight-year-old Bunny, his mother is the centre of his universe. To his older brother, Robert, she is someone he must protect against the dangers of the outside world. And to James Morison, his wife is the foundation on which his family rests and life without her is unimaginable.