Quake, 1: Stories

Quake \kw k\ vi quaked; quak-ing: to shake or vibrate usually from shock or instability.

Unforeseen and unavoidable shocks not only alter our lives but send tremors into the futures of many others. In this intriguing collection of five individual yet interconnected stories, Nance Van Winckel chronicles the ripple effects that one life or action can have on the lives of many seemingly unrelated people.

Held together by a wealth of images, items, and ideals, these tantalizing tales join Sara, Fritz, Maria, Stevie, Nona, Claudia, and Sam as one. An earthquake appears in each story, reminding us that beneath the surface, all is tumult, molten, flux. And while each quake sings of life's unpredictability and precariousness, it is joined by familiar images player pianos, brass doorknobs, and movie posters which fall away, often to return, altered.

The role of Gypsies, apparently inconsequential at first, grows to become a unifying voice. When Sara loses her hands after a freak accident in "Ever After," she encounters two Gypsy sisters whose scandalous family affairs permeate the rest of the book. In "Hearsay," Fritz, an out-of-work ventriloquist, is haunted by a failed love affair with a Gypsy woman thirty-four years past, and the son he never knew. In the final story of the collection, "Taking Leave," the artist Sam leaves his old life behind to start over again, while his wife seeks solace among a group of intriguing women who help her begin anew.

A tapestry of interwoven destinies, of loves lost and lives rediscovered, Quake will pull the reader deep into the intensity of Van Winckel's fictive world.