A Dream of Old Leaves

Bret Lott's powerful, insightful stories illuminate the everyday episodes that move us -- husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighhors -- along the intricate paths of intimacy. A little boy's first bad dream brings his father back to his own childhood nights when danger lurked beneath the bed; in the California desert at night two brothers in a pickup tune into radio stations from distant places, interrupted by sudden bursts of static; estranged suburban friends become good neighbors again in the course of thwarting two thieves.

Lott's previous novels, "The Man Who Owned Vermont" and "A Stranger's House, " established him as "one of the strongest voices to come along in some time" "(The San Francisco Chronicle)." "A Dream of Old Leaves" stakes out his place in the landscape of new American fiction.