Tales of Protection

the long version

"Erik Fosnes Hansen's Tales of Protection consists of four enthralling tales about the nature of luck and chance. Each of the tales is a feat of storytelling in its own right: a story involving a young woman, her old uncle, and a blind, brilliant beekeeper; the story of a lighthouse keeper's harrowing experience during a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea; a story of art, love, and treachery in Renaissance Italy, where religious paintings have miraculous properties; and the story of a mining engineer whose life is changed by a terrible fall "over the edge."". "The tales stand alone but are ingeniously stitched together; they are alike in that they dramatize moments when people change course entirely, and in that they hinge on an understanding of the nature of coincidence, which plays a role in human life something like "the music behind the music." The tales, and the theory of seriality that underlies them, give wide play to Fosnes Hansen's imagination."--BOOK JACKET.