A Strange Wind Blowing

"For all his days are sorrow...his heart taketh not rest in the night," says the sage of Ecclesiastes. The characters in these stories are also pushed to the rack by circumstances. There are grim encounters with death in stories like "House of Mourning" and "In the Loneliness of Unknown Winds". The search for companionship and love is also often doomed to failure ("In the Isle of Britain", Fire and Ice"). But there are little epiphanies too, when life flows sweetly along for a while, transporting lovers towards enchanting isles even amidst the turbulent seas around them ("Torrents of Spring", "Kings and Lovers"). These men and women, in short, have loved and lost like us, their joys as well as their anguish and heartbreak weave a tangled skein, not easy to unravel. But that's the way life is, a fascinating chiaroscuro, reminiscent of a Rembrandt or Caravaggio painting, with its stark interplay of shade and light.