"A wonderful, illuminating piece of work," and "one of the best new novelists I've read in years" - notices like these greeted the publication of Rebecca Hill's first novel, Blue Rise, but even Hill;s earlier fans will be unprepared for the insight and intensity of Among Birches. Once more, "Hill probes the tenderest hurts and guilts, the rage and childhood ties which still lacerate and bind." And once more, her characters' "deeper rebellion is against the onward weep of time itself, since there's nothing like a long marriage for reminding us that the essence of life is running on and running down." But into the tensions of marriage she now introduces the theme of adultery, and into the loyalties of friendship - most particularly friendship among women - she raises the specter of betrayal. Among Birches opens with a party celebrating Aspera Hancock's fortieth birthday. Forty is a precarious time for Aspera, her husband, Will, and their friends in Bracken, Minnesota. These are small town people who have achieved not only a livelihood but strategies to get them through life and whose attention now turns to what is left. They are, in the author's words, "a decade into their post-romantic period," trying "to hold to the channels that would route them between chaos on one side and ossification on the other." No longer young, not yet old, as the ground shifts beneath their feet they discover their three great fears to be "death, divorce and younger lovers." These three elements are all too present at this birthday celebration. Aspera and Will are at odds, and their old friends Dalton and Bunny offer a strained picture of marital bliss. Their friend Vicky is widowed, their friend Dena divorced, Vicky has brought her lover, twenty-six-year-old Kevin Stowe, a young man Aspera and Will have referred to derisively as "Baby Kevin". But Kevin is to prove dangerous beyond his years. Into the ties that bind this group, he introduces loops and slipknots, and soon Aspera finds she must bring new order - beginning a very long way back - to any relationship she means to keep. - Dust jacket.