"The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time."--Dust jacket.

"A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her. Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a...

In the fields of western New York State in the 1970s, a few dozen idealists set out to live off the land, founding a commune on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. They include Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child, Bit, born soon after the commune. Through Bit, Arcadia follows this romantic, rollicking, and tragic utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday and beyond....

"Loni Mae Murrow's life in Washington, DC is tidy, if a trifle constrained. Single and in her mid-thirties, she's a bird artist at the Smithsonian who spends her days at a desk, making elaborate drawings of belted kingfishers and scrub-jays and purple gallinules. Then she's abruptly summoned back home to the wetlands of northern Florida, where she grew up. Her mother, critical and difficult, has grown frail and been resentfully consigned to assisted...