The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what's in someone else's heart—or in our own.

Wickersham's gift is for capturing the habits of mind that lead even smart people to deceive themselves. Her book makes you slow down and listen, and then watch for people to reveal themselves. Elegantly structured, emotionally compelling... Short stories don't get much better than this.