This book is actually six interconnecting stories, rather than a full-length novel. I'm generally not a fan of short stories (although some of these are probably long enough to be considered novellas), and this collection did not change my mind. The stories concern the powerful Grafin family in Arizona, and the same characters appear throughout. They were written in 1944-45, so it's an interesting picture of what Arizona was like back then, and Ms. Baldwin does an excellent job of bringing the beauty of the desert to life. She also weaves the ongoing war into the backdrop--and sometimes the foreground--of the stories. My biggest problems with the collection were that I thought there was rather too much exposition--often providing the history of the Grafin family--and I didn't find the stories to be terribly involving or even, at times, believable.