Twelve years before Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for his remarkable 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, he made his debut with this impressive collection of eight stories. In such tales as "The Hunter's Wife," "Mkondo," and "For a Long Time This Was Griselda's Story," Doerr ranges from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships and some discover unique gifts, but all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves. "Doerr's prose dazzles, his sinewy sentences blending the naturalists' unswerving gaze with the poet's gift for metaphor."—New York Times Book Review