Featuring colorful, exquisitely sculpted stories of many kinds-ranging from the comic to the tragic, the satirical to the serious, the lyrical to the macabre, and even the philosophical to the zany-Love of the Blossoming Hills presents a fascinating cavalcade of characters and incidents steeped in the regional tradition and history of northern New England.

Here we find, among many others, tales of a wildly eccentric family whose interminable feuding over generations is tempered annually only by a glorious Christmas pie. You'll read about the brilliant lawyer whose early and inexplicable death is shrouded in the darkest mystery and about the Russian ballet master who sets up an international ballet school in an isolated farmhouse in the White Mountains.

There's the story of a devoted Latin teacher who enthralls her students with the claim that she's a reincarnation of a girl who perished in the great volcanic catastrophe of Pompei, and of a young schoolgirl whose visit to the sinister domicile of a once renowned "poetess" turns initially into a nightmare and finally into a personal triumph.

These stories, above all, are an expression of a love of life set off against the ever-astonishing natural and social landscape of northern New England.