Book excerpt: Bestselling and award-winning writer D. R. MacDonald gives us a searing and muscular collection of short fiction reminiscent of Richard Ford and Alistair MacLeod. With All the Men Are Sleeping, celebrated author D. R. MacDonald delivers a haunting collection of short fiction remarkable for its restrained passion and eloquence. As he did with Cape Breton Road, MacDonald writes of disruption and loss with brusque tenderness. He deftly explores the misunderstandings between men and women, the nature of seduction and infidelity, the way geography shapes identity, and the heartache of longing -- for home, family, love. For a fisherman in “The Flowers for Bermuda” time has not repaid the loss of his young son’s life. In “The Wharf King” a man returns to Cape Breton to bury his brother, and performs a dangerous rite of passage in an attempt to recapture the past. Little Norman in “Work” is rudderless without the companionship of his lifelong workmate. The brilliant force of the fiction collected here -- some of it published in MacDonald’s award-winning Eyestone -- will delight MacDonald’s fans just as it will astonish new readers. Each of the stories in All the Men Are Sleeping stands alone, but together they offer a heartrending elegy for lost loves and time-forgotten places.