In one of the best-loved volumes of her work, J. California Cooper tells exuberant tales full of wonder at the mystery of life and the hardness of fate. Cooper has emerged as one of the most beloved American writers. She writes with a transparent clarity and such exuberant energy that her characters leap off the page, bursting with the stories they've got to tell-stories of simple people, stories of families and fate, of love and marriage, of death and the triumph of the human spirit. Awed, bedeviled, bemused, all of Cooper's characters are borne up by the sheer power of life itself.