A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a novella

These eleven stories, along with a masterful novella, mark the triumphant return of David Gates, whom <i>New York</i> magazine anointed &quot;a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.&quot;<br><br> <i>A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me</i> is populated by characters, young or old or neither, who are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human condition: parents in assisted-living - or assisted-dying - facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. Terrifyingly self-aware, they refuse to go gently - even when they're going nowhere fast, in settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast to the countryside of upstate New York and New England. <br><br>Relentlessly inventive, alternately hilarious and tragic, always moving, this book proves yet again that Gates is one of our most talented, witty and emotionally intelligent writers.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>