Nobody Goes to Earth Any More — Don Ward

An unpredictable and irreverent debut collection of short stories dealing with everything from infidelity to the declaration of saints.

A young girl dies a brutal death and then miraculously returns to life - complete with a strange and powerful gift. A widower leaves Canada behind and heads back to England to recapture his youth. A woman is accosted in her apartment building by a lunatic - and then the two are interrupted by an improbable and unwelcome intruder. A disgraced doctor becomes a murder suspect in a land far away from his original transgressions. A woman wakes beside a husband who's certainly not the one she went to bed with the night before.

Welcome to the world of Don Ward, where much lies below the surface, goes unsaid, doesn't add up and often misrepresents itself. Nobody Goes to Earth Anymore is a slick and sophisticated collection of short stories, each entry almost a museum piece, a curio to be turned over and over and examined in different lights and from different angles. Each reading reveals different truths (or mistruths), different possibilities, different realities.

Ward makes a sparkling short-fiction debut with Nobody Goes to Earth Anymore, carefully shaping unique and mesmerizing worlds where nothing - even if it really is nothing - is what it seems to be.