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 characters whose fates, in lesser hands, might be thought of as hopeless: the fired cop turned security guard, the stolid, 19-year-old nurses' aide who will not be going to art school, the cynical radio producer who is dying of breast cancer and on a plane on her way to Lourdes.
In these thirteen stories linked by a common transcendent human genius, the writing is confident and clear and original, and often drop-dead stunning, as if the stories are being told by the most casually eloquent among us.

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 killed her policeman husband in a rage struggles to reconcile feelings of emotional worthlessness and a longing for human affection after two decades in prison. A widower of twenty-three years introduces his wary daughters to his new love, a woman whom he has decided to marry one week after meeting, and who once took an axe to a bear to save her husband. Trueblood unites past and present through her characters' complex personalities as she skillfully unravels their tumultuous relationships, giving readers a glimpse into marital circumstances that, though often tragic, will surely ring familiar.

SEVEN LOVES tells the story of Mary Nilson's life through the indelible loves that define it over the years. From the passionate affair that changes her family and her future, to the risk-taking son she tries to save from himself; from the flame-haired mother whose eccentric view of the world guides her, to the young co-worker whose beauty moves her in ways she can't explain, May introduces us to the vivid and gorgeously drawn characters who are at the heart of her greatest joys and her most wrenching choices. In the tradition of Alice Munro and Carol Shields, Valerie Trueblood takes us through the loves and losses, regrets and surprising opportunities for redemption that encompass a life. Deeply satisfying, suffused with emotion and insight, SEVEN LOVES is a debut novel that reads like the work of a master