cover image All the Little Live Things

All the Little Live Things

Wallace Earle Stegner. Penguin Books, $15 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-14-015441-2

Retirees Joseph and Ruth Allston find their placid, rural California life disrupted by a hippie who builds a treehouse on their property and by a young married couple tragically affected by pregnancy and cancer. ``Quite simply, a beautiful novel--strong, moving, wise, funny--as topical as today's newspaper,'' said PW. (Dec.)