Book excerpt: Only a storyteller as agile as Richard Ford could produce stories so rich and diverse on a single grand theme -- love, intimacy and their dramatic failures. With felicity, humour, insight and painful candour, A Multitude of Sins exposes our failure to be sincere, empathetic, patient, honest, passionate -- ultimately, to be loving -- to those we desire or should merely care for. In this fine collection, human relations, indeed our entire sense of right and wrong, are put into vivid and unforgettable play.