In the fictional Northern California city of San Andreas de Pacifico, the ground is unstable. In these twelve unexpected love stories, so are many of the people. A woman hears the elephants speak, but only before earthquakes. A long-married couple scales a cemetery wall to regain their passion. A young mother dreams of planting a poison garden. An old man, losing himself to dementia, finds an abandoned baby. Strangers meet on an overnight bus and alter each other’s lives. A struggling writer gains freedom in her effort to rescue a beached whale.

SAN ANDREAS evokes the beauties and vulnerabilities of the human condition and explores life’s shaky ground—physical, emotional, and psychological. Award-winning author Ericka Lutz (The Edge of Maybe) brings her distinctive, unflinching, lyrical voice to these unforgettable characters who yearn for connection—with each other and the natural world.

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Ericka Lutz is the author of the novel, The Edge of Maybe, seven nonfiction books, and many award-winning short stories, poems, and essays. She’s been a Pushcart nominee for poetry, winner of the Boston Fiction Festival, Fellow at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, solo performer and storyteller, and longtime writing coach. She loves playing with words, clay, animals, compost, and her beloveds. She lives on the edge of the Pacific in Northern California, and hosts creativity retreats in exciting, international places.

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In Ericka Lutz’s piercing, quietly unsettling stories, unseen fault lines—between lovers, parents and children, the living and the dying—shift and rupture beneath ordinary lives. Set against backdrops of earthquakes, mudslides, tsunamis, and imagined catastrophes, these characters strain toward connection even as they falter, misunderstand, or turn away. Lyrical and unflinching, this collection traces the primal, often inarticulate forces that fracture us—and the fragile, fleeting moments that bind us together.

David Holper, Eureka Poet Laureate Emeritus