With Exiles, his first collection of shorter fiction, the author of the universally acclaimed, best-selling memoir A Rumor of War ("It will make the strongest among us weep",  wrote John Gregory Dunne) sends the reader on a tripartite adventure.

First to suburban Connecticut, where a young blue-collar man on the way to his mother's funeral falls in with an upper-crust couple who lavish attention on him and pull him into unexpected dilemmas.

Then to Australia's Torres Strait, where a charismatic but troublesome stranger washes ashore into the thick of a struggle for a tiny island's very identity.

Then to Vietnam--vintage Caputo territory--where a squad of misfits plunge deep into the jungle in search of the body of their mess sergeant, who has been carried off by a tiger.

No matter the backdrop, Philip Caputo's ear for the vernacular is unerring, while his interrogation of human nature--of the deceptions we inflict on ourselves and others--is unflinching. Exiles affirms the remarkable range, the freedom from genre, of a writer whose "meditations on the love and hate of war  were hailed by William Styron as "among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature.