Stunning stories that explore the countless ways we pursue love and occasionally misplace it, or sometimes just let it slip through our fingers.

Peter Guralnick’s storytelling voice is a marvel: uniquely conversational, consistently erudite and witty. In these stories he has created an unforgettable cast of dreamers, misfits, and observers struggling to navigate the distance between who they are and who they set out to be. Like Guralnick’s prize-winning biographies of Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips, these stories find their meaning in perfectly observed detail: They are deeply felt and deeply examined, while never failing to show empathy for characters longing to find a place in a world where everyone else seems to have found theirs.

In one story, a chance meeting in a Key West bar brings fleeting refuge to two damaged souls. In another, an aging creative writing professor confronts his own loss of self-belief in the face of a student’s unmistakable brilliance. The suicide of a childhood friend twenty-five years after childhood is over brings two teenage lovers together for a brief, fragile time. At the heart of the collection, Guralnick transports readers to the smoky rhythm and blues bars, ragged baseball diamonds, bookstores, and book-lined apartments of Boston and Cambridge in the 1950s and ‘60s. Three stories follow Danny, a young boy growing up in a second-and-third-generation family that is confident in the promise of assimilation: a grandfather brimming over with positive energy; a father returned from the war to pick up an interrupted life he can’t wait to begin; a mother struggling with an increasingly debilitating deafness that threatens to upend her world.

Collectively, these stories evince a heartbroken beauty, shot through with a profound sensitivity to all that can hurt us, all that holds us back, all that makes us human. With this collection Peter Guralnick achieves a new creative high point. As writer Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) said of his novel, Nighthawk Blues, some years ago, “We can all be pleased and grateful that Guralnick came to fiction. We knew he was a comprehensive reporter, and now we know that he is extraordinarily able as a storyteller, too.”