Quake

A rich conceit loosely links the five stories in Van Winckel's new collection (after Limited Lifetime Warranty): in each tale, an earthquake occurs. Van Winckel's characters are oddballs and misfits, most notably Sarah, who, in the opening story, ""Ever After,"" is electrocuted when lightning strikes a ladder she's clutching. While she recuperates in a nursing home, she is befriended by two Gypsy sisters who live according to a tightly prescribed set of rules and customs, some of which Sara ends up adopting. The duo offer to help Sarah as she gets ready to start her life anew. These sisters, along with their relatives and lovers, serve as key figures in the other stories as well. Van Winckel's tales offer pictures of outcasts, people not quite comfortable in their own circles of family and friends and equally ill at ease with strangers. Her writing is crisp, marked by dry humor and the uncommon ability to make a narrator's voice convincing while letting the reader in on ironies lost to the speaker. Like the earth that shakes within them, these stories themselves deftly intersect and collide, in a sort of plate tectonics of narrative and character. (Apr.)