MY PRISONER AND OTHER STORIES

A collection reckons with big legal and moral questions.

Just over halfway through McAndrew’s collection comes a story called “Crime and Punishment,” a title that would accurately describe most of these tales, which often reckon with incarceration, guilt, and the aftereffects of violent acts. Sometimes that reaches baroque heights, as in “The Storyteller,” about a couple named Wayne and Nancy who buy “the house that had been the site of the famous Hobson murders.” The violent acts that took place there don’t return to the surface until the pair has divorced, with the house’s potential for supernatural visitations something Wayne taps into in conversations with his children. The young narrator of the title story sees an arm waving from a nearby prison and starts to wonder what its owner’s story might be: “at bedtime, my imagination unraveled like a scroll of every crime I’d ever heard of.” McAndrew has sympathy for many of his characters; Maria, protagonist of “The Familiar Dark,” has a penchant for casual burglary but winds up helping an older woman, Ania, who’s in the midst of a complicated grieving process. Late in the collection, McAndrew uses questions of crime and guilt to raise the stakes, placing his characters in places where they must try to understand the people in their lives—whether it’s a relative who committed a terrible act in “Letters From Toby” or a man with a penchant for unusual pets living in a halfway house in “How I Came To See the World.” McAndrew doesn’t shrink from asking big moral questions, and his fiction abounds with lived-in touches and a sense of scale.

Philosophical stories and memorable characters sure to spark debate.