The facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and other stories

Here are four unforgettable stories by the author of Life of Pi . In the exquisite title novella, a very young man dying of AIDS joins his friend in fashioning a story of the Roccamatio family of Helsinki, set against the yearly march of the twentieth century whose horrors and miracles their story echoes. In 'The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American composer John Morton,' a Canadian university student visits Washington, D.C., and experiences the Vietnam War and its aftermath through an intense musical encounter. In 'Manners of Dying,' variations of a warden's letter to the mother of a son he has just executed reveal how each life is contained in its end. The final story, 'The Challenges of Science,' chronicles how when fantasy and reality meet, even one of the great minds of science is confounded.