Frank Copenhaver has always been lucky in love and successful in business. Then unexpectedly his wife walks out on him, his investments go bad, and he is besieged by banks and unattached females.

"Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and McGuane's hallmark Big Sky country with its vast and unforgiving landscape, [here are 45 stories] of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship. Moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again, McGuane writes about familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness, celebrating the human ability...

"As his mother's dementia worsens, a devoted, favored son is shocked to learn of his mother's past; a father's meager outdoor skills are no match for a terrifying turn in the weather; old friends holding too many grudges go camping and hire a suicidal guide with too many rules. In several stories, unlikely alliances form: an eccentric neighbor who babysits for a busy, unstable couple becomes overly attached; an accomplished cattle geneticist gets...

Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives recognizable and strange: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather at the bedside of their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, Thomas McGuane's signature landscape: a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity;...