"Discover hundreds of facts you never knew about England in this fascinating miscellany"--Jacket.

Cholera has broken out in London, but Florence Nightingale has bigger problems when people begin dying of a far more intentional cause-murder. The London summer of 1854 is drawing to a close when a deadly outbreak of cholera grips the city. Florence Nightingale is back on the scene marshaling her nurses to help treat countless suffering patients at Middlesex Hospital as the disease tears through the Soho slums. But beyond the dangers of the disease,...

This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.

In 1968 two boys are born into a large family, both named for their grandfather, Peter Henry Hightower. One boy--Peter--grows up in Africa and ends up a journalist in Granada. The other--Petey--becomes a minor criminal, first in Cleveland and then in Kiev. In 1995, Petey runs afoul of his associates and disappears. But the criminals, bent on revenge, track down the wrong cousin, and the Peter in Granada finds himself on the run. He bounces from one...