Four college-age roommates live in James's house. Two are Native American, one of them a parolee. All attend church, more or less. Only one perceives the conflicts that will eventually turn the house against itself.

Homemaking never went this far.

Alex McKelvey longs to fit in. She doesn't realize that her earth-mother style—the connections she feels toward the earth and to a certain eerie pictograph panel—sets her off from the crowd. Wanting only to enjoy the beauty of the Utah desert, she packs up her gear and her Siberian husky, Kit, and joins an archaeological dig.

Jacob Dennison believes that every good thing in life comes at a cost. His wife Pam's miscarriage confirms that. Never mind that his boss at Food World has outrageous demands; that his father, a shady oil field equipment salesman, wants to make him a man in his own image. Never mind that his new friend Dwayne, a cunning drug dealer and occultist, wants nothing less than his discipleship. Jacob...

The stories of Where Nothing Is Long Ago are a celebration of Sorensen's childhood. She wrote most of them in 1962 while she stayed eight months with her father in Springville, Utah, after her sister's death. (The title story and "The Face" had been published earlier in The New Yorker.) The narrator of each story is an adult remembering her experiences as a child and narrating events from the...