Double Happiness: Stories

The reader eagerly waits for the hammer to fall in these 11 wickedly drawn stories by the author of Wavemaker II. Hughes’s characters are skillfully delineated modern types, caught off-guard and vulnerable, such as Raymond, the glib, successful writer of “The Aces,” who, while in Rome with his pregnant wife, runs into a former fling that ended badly: “Kind of comic, really, but then he remembered that maybe he’d been a bit of a bastard.” In the marvelously rueful “Blue Grass,” the young woman narrator senses that her longtime lover is becoming less attracted to her, and an unlikely triangle forms as the narrator becomes attracted to her just-buried sister’s boyfriend. Each of the tales opens out to surprising plot twists, such as in “Guidance,” which recounts the surreal adventures of a model who had been living the high life in Tokyo before marrying an older, rich American bad guy, becoming pregnant with twins, and essentially being imprisoned within a walled compound in Jakarta. The resonant title story, set in the aftermath of 9/11 as a mother comes to terms with the loss of her son, caps this intensely moving collection. (June)