Bret Lott's powerful, insightful stories illuminate the everyday episodes that move us -- husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighhors -- along the intricate paths of intimacy. A little boy's first bad dream brings his father back to his own childhood nights when danger lurked beneath the bed; in the California desert at night two brothers in a pickup tune into radio stations from distant places, interrupted by sudden bursts of static; estranged suburban friends become good neighbors again in the course of thwarting two thieves.

Lott's previous novels, The Man Who Owned Vermont and A Stranger's House, established him as "one of the strongest voices to come along in some time" (The San Francisco Chronicle). A Dream of Old Leaves stakes out his place in the landscape of new American fiction.