[In the following brief review, Warner praises Findley's characterization and focus on isolation in the short fiction collection Stones.]

Musing on the fervent need of children to love their parents, a middle-aged narrator admits. "I would have loved a stone". He might well be speaking for any of the characters in this new collection of stories [Stones] by Timothy Findley. Driven to love, they find that love itself drives them away. "Something in the signature informed him she would always be alone," we are told as one man reflects on a note left by his mother. Couples sleep in separate beds and imagine the infidelities of their mates. Even the animals suffer isolation. While putting his dying brother's house in order, a man wishes he could explain things to the cat that will "wonder, perhaps forever, where all his people had gone and why they had deserted him." In someone else's hands, these characters might provoke merely pity or irritation, but Mr. Findley, the winner of Canada's prestigious Governor-General's Award, has the skilled touch of a surgeon. Under our skins, he reminds us, we all look much the same. Although they occupy the same landscape and frequent the same places, the characters in his stories remain, strangers to one another. Like the stones on the beach at Dieppe, where the middle-aged man in the title story scatters his father's ashes, they are "treacherous" but "also beautiful," together but alone.