With Blue Spruce, David Long emerges as one of America's most searching and inventive fiction writers. Most of these twelve stories are set in northwest Montana, near the Canadian border - a beautiful and desolate landscape of glacier-carved mountains and tall sweeps of prairie grass, rustic cabins, and newly built tract homes.

Here Long explores the mysteries of life's beginnings, endings, and continuities; the unexpressed or extinguished passions that can crimp and close hearts; and the unexpected longings and quiet pleasures that guide his characters through days and years that seem to slip away.

The people of Blue Spruce are often confronted with sudden ambiguities and sharp pangs of surprise. In "Eggarine," a disconsolate young man reflects on the loss of his parents, and begins to probe his submerged feelings about his father - the grief that murmurs and tugs at him. "Perfection" brilliantly moves from a courtroom testimony to a meditation about the waning of innocence. In the title story, two sisters-in-law must face a tragedy that has long haunted them.

And in the final story, "The New World," a middle-aged man, fleeing the confines of his small town, discovers a fresh life on the fog-laden shores of the Pacific Ocean.