Winner of the Selena McDonald Kennedy Fiction Award. Includes "Gallopers," which was awarded the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. Meet the men and women who dwell on the far side of the California Dream: a war vet who rustles cactus near Palm Springs, a teenager living in the shadow of Disneyland about to be pulled into the draft, a Hollywood actress on the run from a violent past, a North Coast fisherman whose marriage founders when his son is lost at sea. Spare but lyrical, these beautiful tales of love, loss, and redemption, where place is as much a character as the people, take readers on an unforgettable journey along the deep river of the human spirit.