Light of the New Day

Book excerpt: In the shared setting of fictional Balford, Wyoming, the characters in Darin Cozzens's stories demonstrate both the follies and the virtues of rural Mormons in the late twentieth century. Hewell Penroy is a forty-two-year-old bachelor who, unbeknownst to his mother, falls in love with Benita, the meter reader he has never met. Flynn Darlington plays matchmaker with the youngest of his four unmarried daughters and an itinerant roofer. For all their married life, Rowe Sloan has struggled to supply his wife Vida with enough water for her household, but his crowning effort ends in tragedy. And with high school long past and no taste for college or missionary service, Siler Godwin faces the doom of digging postholes until, as he says, "something better comes up." Yet whatever their quirks and limitations, these characters are, in the end, as thoroughly human as heartache and love.