"The Afterlife" and other stories. (Original writing)

This thesis is a collection of four short stories and the first part of a novella. Three of the stories are set in London, England, one in Vienna, Austria, and one--the novella--in South Florida. The characters' ordinary lives are the substance of hope and grief and comfort: a middle-aged logician unexpectedly recovers his long-buried emotional self; while recalling the building of a dinghy, a mother tries to come to terms with her grown daughter's unhappiness; a boy, torn between grief for and loyalty to his dead father, struggles to understand his own faith; a girl on the threshold of sexual awareness discovers that not even the closest of friendships is safe from betrayal; a Peruvian immigrant, faced with family crisis, begins to question the value of what she's achieved outside her language and culture. In all of the stories, small miracles bring the characters to the brink of deeper understanding about human frailty.