Bodies of Water collects fourteen stories from a writer who has spent a lifetime paying attention. The settings range from a nursing home in suburban Illinois to a Greek fishing dory in the Ligurian Sea, from the Ore Mountains of East Germany to the banks of False Creek in Vancouver. The characters are equally various: firefighters and phlebotomists, art dealers and wood turners, a Haitian nurse’s aide, a Bosnian refugee, a ventriloquist’s dummy buried in a California garden.

What connects them is water — and what water has always represented in human life: danger and sustenance, memory and forgetting, the boundary between the life you have and the life you might have chosen. Each story places a character at that boundary and watches, without judgment and with great precision, what they do next.

Some jump. Some surface. Some reach for the phone. All of them are unforgettable.