Telling My Love Lies

Telling My Love Lies begins romantically in the hot and prickly cornfields of pubescent youth, lambent with country-and-western songs of the narrator's past, and concludes in operatic San Francisco, the refuge of an older narrator in elegiac flight from an imprisoning tire farm and the taint of glory holes.

In between, in these doubly imagined stories, a lover of rock 'n' roll flies to a Mexican Club Med seeking solace for her lost voice; the ex-botany teacher who's a deported war criminal jets back to Holland in disgrace and handcuffs; a retired doctor and his wife drift out of control in a balloon's gondola over the Gulf of Thailand; while a socialist Sikh politician takes rhetorical flight in his own soaring craft above a river. This is the same river where another character, dying, fishes illegally for the timeless sturgeon.

What anchors these nine interlocking stories and one novella is the community of Perumbur, alive with lakes and hot springs, blueberry farms and cold wars. Keath Fraser's anthology of richly painted characters is an ardent, beautiful celebration of their yearning and of the story-telling imagination.