The interlocking worlds of the erotic and the religious are explored in the novella and ten stories in this collection. The stories range through time and space, from present-day Toronto to the nineteenth-century high Arctic, from the Greek Islands to Kathmandu, from a tunnel under Vimy Ridge in 1915 where a Canadian sentry hears his enemy singing through the wall, to a tourist town in the Rockies where a painter and her dying husband make love for the last time.

Steven Heighton's profile page

STEVEN HEIGHTON was the author of the novel Afterlands, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Europe, Agni, Poetry London, Brick, Best English Stories, and many others. Heighton has won several awards and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. He died in 2022.

"Steven Heighton is a writer of high intelligence and wit, an immaculate and sensuous stylist whose prose moves fluidly from the acerbic to the erotic." —Janette Turner Hospital

"Heighton writes beautifully on love and regret." —The Globe and Mail

"Heighton writes convincingly…switching smoothly between lyricism and the erotic, between grandeur and elegiac mood. He can carve out a scene of beauty in a few words, but is also able to realize the unremarkable with a vivifying simplicity." —Times Literary Supplement

"Masterly...tales of sex, morality and faith striated with compassion and humanity. The stories possess a rarefied beauty and a capacity to imagine the familiar afresh." —The Sunday Times
"There’s not a wilting word in on earth as it is; these stories are real and rooted and vital." —Quill and Quire

"Heighton writes twith elegance and a breathtaking audacity…and succeeds in defying the odds [by presenting] a second collection of short stories that is, if anything, even better than his first." —Winnipeg Free Press

"Heighton is a brilliant stylist unafraid of investigating the big questions of contemporary life." —Vancouver Sun

"Masterly…tales of sex, mortality an dfaith striated with compassion and humanity. The stories possess a rarefied bearuty and a capacity to imagine the familiar afresh." —Sunday Times

"His intense, multi-layered work demands concentration from the reader-who will be rewarded at every turn." —The literary review (U.K.)