The Sorrow of Others

This short story collection explores feelings of foreignness, loneliness, home, and loss. In one story, a woman takes care of her sick husband after he has been gone for eighteen years. In another, a college student paints an elderly woman, for reasons that don't become clear until much later. The title story is about a widower who remarries without love, but who discovers, in his new marriage, something better, a companion for his grief. These stories are all, in essence, about place. They ask what happens when we leave somewhere, what happens when we return, and what happens when we choose to stay. The stories all occur at some point of intersection--where one world, or one self, meets another. --page iv.