Fires

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "e;The Fires,"e; Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish-to be cremated-only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "e;The Exorcism,"e; Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his life when he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand piano.