The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind

Like his PEN/Faulkner Award -- winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's beautifully observed and emotionally piercing short stories are set largely in the Pacific Northwest. In those vast landscapes, hunting, fishing, and sports are the givens of men's lives. But although Guterson's characters go into the wilderness in search of mallards or silver trout, they discover other things instead: the decay of their youthful ardor; the motiveless cruelty of strangers; their own capacity for deception and grief.

Generously imagined, masterfully restrained, and written in prose that stings like the scent of gunpowder, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind is a collection of extraordinary power.

Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, is also available from Random House AudioBooks.