Devotions

This introspective and wide-ranging story collection from Caldwell (These Days) is peopled with unsettled characters. In “All Grown Up,” a divorced father returns to Northern Ireland to clear out his mother’s house after her death, has an unexpected tryst, and tries to understand what happened to his marriage. In “The Lady of the House,” a young aspiring actor, feeling unmoored, visits her sister’s new home in Scotland, where she’s haunted by a malevolent presence. Caldwell, also a playwright, shines in stories about performance, such as “Little Lands,” a close reading of the Ländler scene in The Sound of Music; “Harmony Hill,” about a musician traveling from North Carolina to Dublin with her 17th-century Peter Guarnerius violin; and the collection’s standout, “Hamlet, a Love Story.” That one centers on the players in an “edgy, choose-your-own-adventure-style production of Hamlet,” in which the prince controls the action after Act I. The narrator is the widow of the production’s original Hamlet, and the story masterfully explores the play itself, grief, and the protagonist’s feeling of “drifting—carried along in other people’s slipstreams.” There’s much to admire in these nuanced stories. (June)