Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

This is a collection of short stories exploring love and loss.

Part One
I finished the first section, "William and Clare" this morning...four short stories about the evolution of one couple's relationship...first colleagues, then best friends, illicit lovers, and finally husband and wife. It started with a great first line: "At two o'clock in the morning, no one is to blame."

And then there was the first paragraph:

We'd been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military analyst in the studio with new developments from Kabul, when William put his hand on my breast. My husband was asleep upstairs...and William's wife was asleep in the guest room...

I was hooked. Who are these people??? What's going on? How did they get here? To this moment? I inhaled the next 58 pages of their story.

My only complaint is that the first story, "Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages," was written in Clare's voice, and all the rest were in third person. The shift was jarring. By the end of the first story, I was attached to her, and I missed her voice and her perspective.