In the opening story, “Christmas Holiday, 1945,” a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany’s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn’t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who’s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In “The Visit,” a man named Rob struggles with feelings of guilt and loss as he travels from Detroit, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina, in the wake of his mother’s death. In “Marooned in Marrakesh,” a married couple visiting their son, Mike, who’s joined the Peace Corps, find themselves stranded in Morocco on September 11, 2001. “Recluse” follows Vincent Jackson, a disabled Vietnam veteran who attends a music festival. A performer is murdered onstage, and Jackson—who was also onstage at the time—is wrongly suspected of murder. A married couple in “Maggie” must put down a beloved pet, and in “Hurricane Helene,” residents of Asheville, North Carolina, try to recover after much of the town, including the famous River Arts District, is destroyed in a flood; “Hitchhiking to Hingning” recalls the story of Edith that was begun in the first vignette. These deeply engrossing, slice-of-life episodes have the air of a folk song, in which characters are quickly introduced (often in medias res) and presented with low-stakes problems. The lack of resolution in several tales only further enhances a sense of the uncanny. Certain tales stand out: “Christmas Holiday, 1945” beautifully conveys the anxiety and jubilation of the first Christmas after the war’s end, “Marooned in Marrakesh” and “Recluse” feature people in desperate straits who command the reader’s sympathy, and the character of Vincent Jackson feels like someone dreamed up by Johnny Cash or Kenny Rogers. Despite the occasional anachronism (such as a woman in the 1940s eating sesame chicken, which didn’t gain popularity until the ’70s), the stories set in the past are immersive and credibly rendered.