"Foreigners both in their home and homeland, the people in these stories search for meaning in hospitals, in homes, in family, in graves. Caught most symbolically in the crossfire lie the bodies, minds, and lives of women. A French woman is renamed in order to be buried beside her Algerian husband. Another returns to her tumultuous country of birth and is haunted by vivid childhood memories of her martyred parents. With the will to justly carry divergent loyalties, the characters in these stories prove how the force of the human heart can never be confined by any geographic border."--BOOK JACKET.