This powerful new collection of James Lee Burke's short fiction ranges across landscapes that he has made his own, from rural Louisiana and Mississippi to war-torn Vietnam and a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Told with his trademark blend of lyrical prose and hard-eyed realism, they bring a host of extraordinary characters to vivid life: soldiers and prostitutes, nuns and children, musicians and gangsters, all the while movingly exploring 'the near certainty of tragedy to come and the smoldering embers of possibility in the ashes of blighted lives' (BOOKLIST). Whether bittersweet evocations of childhood and a New Orleans that was 'a song, not a city', or pain-fuelled tales of wartime atrocities and the destruction of a modern-day Atlantis, these stories go right to the heart of the American experience, confirming James Lee Burke as one of its most profound chroniclers.