John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father's Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.

'Personal Archaeology' considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and 'The Full Glass' distills a lifetime's happiness into one brimming moment of an old man's bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in 'The Walk with Elizanne' and 'The Road Home' restore their hero to youth's commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, "the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition".