An exciting fiction debut: a collection of psychologically complex, often darkly comic stories that take us into the self-made Edens of travelers whose certain paths around the world lead invariably back to the uncertain self.

The title story introduces Charles Mortimer, an aging, ailing war reporter determined to reestablish his name by covering a little-noted civil war playing out in the Sahara. In the stories that follow, we see the arc of his life: extraordinary journalistic accomplishment at the very apex of his field; a precipitous, disgraced end to his career; and, finally, a chance discovery of an obituary that revives his memories of the beautiful French photographer who had accompanied him through the Sahara, and whose love he forfeited as the price for his fleeting success.

The Caribbean is the deceptively paradisiacal setting for the second cycle of stories. In “Castaway” a globe-trotting businessman—he thinks of his university housing fifteen years earlier as his last real home—finds himself trapped by his own freedom, the “dream he set out to fulfill [having] become grim truth.” In “Old Providence” a dissolute artist mourns a lost love and the “bloody perfect island” where, through his own callow foolishness, he lost her. And in “Darien Dogs” a stockbroker who once had everything, now down on his luck in Panama City, takes off in desperation on a surreal quest into “the aboriginal Caribbean” of the San Blas archipelago, a protected environment for the local Cuna Indians but for him a primitive, confounding, hellish maze.

Imbued with an erotic, muscular charge, imaginative depth and compulsive energy—here is the work of an assured and gifted writer.