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Twelve years in America and Eziafa Okereke has nothing to show for it. Desperate to re-write his story, Eziafa returns to Nigeria to find a woman he can mold to his taste. Eighteen-year-old Zina has big dreams. An arranged marriage to a much older man isn’t one of them. Trapped by family expectations, Zina marries Eziafa, moves to Houston, and trains as a nurse. Buffeted by a series of disillusions, the couple stagger through a turbulent marriage until Zina decides to change the rules of engagement.

Sweeping from Nazi Germany in 1939 to the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, Stephen Henighan’s A Grave in the Air is a masterful sequence of stories. In these tales, dominated by Central and Eastern European themes, readers are transported across borders and into the lives of characters who have something serious at stake, people enmeshed in acts of destruction, and people redeemed through honour and grace. These narratives bear Henighan’s cosmopolitan stamp, but they do not take place in a sanitized global village. There are no stereotypes on which to hang a plot, no filtered sense of the human condition. There are stories of betrayal, such as “Beyond Bliss”, where a young British woman uses sex, duplicity and her connections to an Eastern European exile to become a partner in a Canadian literary press; luminous studies of introspection and character, such as “Freedom Square”, in which a Romanian photographer’s desire to escape her mother country yields to surrender to it; and ironic stories of historical displacement, such as “A Sense of Time”, in which an erotic memory takes life for a Canadian expatriate in England, and “Duty Calls”, where a Hungarian Montrealer experiencing divorce becomes the unsuspecting catalyst for another couple’s commitment.

The two long stories, which bracket the collection, summarize its themes. In the opening story, a British businessman relies on the sporting spirit to try to avert the onset of the Second World War; in the title story, a weary foreign correspondent, shaken by his encounter with a band’s disturbing groupie, must face his own truth about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

Whether moving readers to reflection or providing engaging entertainment, Henighan’s prose is sharp and clean. Once again, he is as instructive in his understanding of peoples and cultures as he is instinctive in taking us inside the worlds that shape them.

At 46, Miles Hann gives it all up for the little cottage he has built on the slopes of his native Ingonish, Cape Breton. Miles has five times circumnavigated the globe and in his years of wandering has grown weary of man’s work of mendacity and pursuit of pleasure. Mostly though, Miles is tired; even a trip around the harbour is a weighty prospect. He writes himself a letter to express better his commitment to stay away from all, to contemplate the animals of the slope and to try for even one day with no ill thought of others. He does not manage it. For, people climb the hill to his door. They know Miles is a quiet man, a polite man; that Miles has travelled everywhere there is to travel and that he alone must have the answers to the burning questions singeing their hearts. Also — who else is there free like this to drop in on any time you want? No one is who.

Miles listens to every word of how yet again the world has been maligning even these poor gentle folk. And, afterward, though he has told them nothing, each visitor agrees that: yes, Miles Hann is one wise man. On their way back down his hill they agree to it; they stop and turn to his lofty house and say aloud: “Yes! Wise if ever wise there was one. The man bothers with not a soul!” Miles waves his hand and he shakes his head too, turning for his trees: ‘Further proof of the pride,’ he says. ‘And that everyone is a wound.’ The next time that someone comes (and it is every day now), Miles runs for the cover of his trees, to crouch and hide from them. He spies at the same instant the little red fox that had been visiting him: ‘Charlie, the one who found my glasses! the one who now leads me haphazardly up the mountain proper and out onto the beautiful lonesome rockslide scree of a blackening evening. Here is one place I have not been up to in many, many years’, and as he remarks further at its utter forlornness, lurking in the black spruce fringe is a badly starved coyote pack, one grown desperate and bold, one that has killed.