Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking,...

In the 1920's a Chinese youth from the country comes to Chungking with his mother where the bustling city offers adventure and his apprenticeship to a coppersmith brings good fortune.

When a young kestrel makes its first flight among the buildings of a city, it is pursued by a hawk.

It was a stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them-no one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man. When crime-fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause just for a moment-and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men...

"Welcome to Stanhope. A safe neighborhood. A place for families. On the surface, William Wooler is a family man. But he's been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Avery's family declares her missing. Suddenly Stanhope doesn't...

Heather Hampton returns to Moses Lake to help sell the family farm but finds herself on an unexpected journey into the area's history, hope, and heart.

Back in Elmwood Springs, Missouri the experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ask the question "Why are we here"?

Molly Allen lives alone in Portland, but her heart is in Franklin, Tennessee, with a man she cannot forget. Back in Franklin, Ryan Kelly frequents The Bridge, remembering the hours spent with Molly in their favorite bookstore. Now, after thirty years of providing the community with coffee, conversation, and good books, owners Charlie and Donna Barton cannot recover from a devastating flood. But in the face of tragedy, miracles begin to unfold.

"Wheatfield, Minnesota, is a metropolis of all six hundred souls and change for which the word "moribund" might have been coined. Nothing ever happened there, and nothing ever would, until the mayor of sorts (campaign slogan: "I'll Do What I Can") and his precocious teenage buddy come up with a scheme to put Wheatfield on the map. Should something dramatic occur-say, an apparition of the Virgin Mary miraculously appearing at the local Catholic church-the...