From the author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index, a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love, and of the impossibility of understanding, much less controlling, it.

In these seven beautifully wrought variations on a theme, a series of characters trace and retrace eternal yet ever-changing patterns of love and longing, connection and loss. These stories range over centuries and continents—from eighteenth-century Vienna, where Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte are collaborating on their operas; to America in the 1940s, where a love triangle unfolds among a doctor, a journalist, and the president's wife. A racecar driver's widow, a teacher in a prep school, a resident in a nursing home, a paralyzed dancer married to a famous choreographer—all of them feel the overwhelming force of passion and renunciation. With uncanny emotional exactitude, Joan Wickersham shows how we never really know what's in someone else's heart, or in our own; how we continually try to explain each other and console ourselves; and how love, like storytelling, is ultimately a work of the imagination.