By Mary Bess Dunn

Fate Havens

This is not the way it’s supposed to be. Her son’s partner is a man. Her daughter abandons God. Her widowed friend takes a lover way too soon. Her husband accepts it all with grace. These are some of the challenges facing Roslyn Hansen Meyers who comes from good people and is duty bound to carry out the promise of her Southern roots. In this cycle of stories, unfolding over the last half century into the present, Roslyn’s nearest and dearest come to terms, each in their own way, with the tragedies, triumphs, and painful surprises family loyalty demands, while Roslyn’s struggles to keep up in a world where even sunshine is unsafe.

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Kirkus Review

Fate Havens

This set of interconnected tales addresses societal expectations and the persistence of familial love.

Dunn’s debut is a story collection, but the linkages between each entry make it read almost like a novel. Readers follow Roslyn Hansen Meyers from the first story, “Worthy,” as she battles her emotions about a large, beautiful family tree, drawn on parchment, which she’s purchased for herself. “Under a Different Sun” begins in 1978 and shows Roslyn’s struggle, over years, as her love for her gay son finally manages to overcome her homophobia. The stories later examine her husband, William, and her daughter, Ruth.

Again and again, the stories return to core questions: What is a good life? What do we owe to family? In “Pending,” Dunn explores end-of-life concerns by having William and another character discuss Roslyn’s Alzheimer’s disease frankly. Every story offers stark, clear language and a world of unspoken implications, and they’re often masterful works of understatement. The story “What It Takes”—in which an adult Ruth works hard to invest herself in the life of a troubled young girl—goes into marvelous depth, lasting longer than expected and deeply exploring how far one can and should go to help another. Ruth’s daughter, Rosalie, gets married in “Certain Kind of Mother” in a tale that brings out Ruth’s uncertainties about her choices as a parent. The final, somber story, “Staying Alive,” features Rosalie pondering her own life. Through it all, Dunn’s characters never settle into simple emotions, and many stories have an engaging mood of nostalgia, tinged with sadness.

An intricately woven story collection about intergenerational connections.

For fans of Olive Kitteridge, these beautifully written, intertwining stories will quietly slay you. Precisely detailed yet elliptical enough that we slip ourselves and our own experiences into the cracks and are at once immersed, watching the characters wrestle with familial and domestic obligations, and making hard choices between lives of bondage, or of freedom and transcendence.

—Karen Essex, internationally bestselling author of Kleopatra and Leonardo’s Swans

In Fate Havens, author Mary Bess Dunn chronicles the despair of white middle-class southern women who came of age in the aftermath of World War II. Told in a linked story cycle, the book describes the prison of respectability into which these women are born, and how their impossible dreams are slowly blunted and tamed. As husbands, children, and friends come and go, can these women settle for the uneasy comfort of their lives? Dunn is a gifted writer whose insights pinch hard. Keenly observed and achingly poetic, each story sparkles with dangerous truth.

— M.M. Buckner, award-winning author of War Surf, Watermind, and other novels.

Fate Havens, an amazing collection of short fiction, focuses on Roslyn and her family, as traditions change leaving some people behind, while others depart gleefully from those same traditions. These intimate portraits expose one southern family’s triumphs and failures, loves and losses with a delicate, often lyrical touch that allows the reader to experience the kaleidoscope of emotions that comprise the life examined. Each story is told, not through the sweep of monumental events so much as with the smallest of gesture, word, and thought surprising readers in the end with their accumulated and heart-piercing, universal truths.

—C.F. Stice, author of Always Yours: Memoir of an Adopted Child and Darla Dreaming at the Carnival with Elvis

Mary Bess Dunn delights with sharp detail, unexpected turns of phrase, and richness of character and dialog. Read of women dissatisfied with the choices they have made, and of the men who love them. Their stories will haunt you for days and months on end.

—Rita Welty Bourke, author of Kylie’s Ark: The Making of a Veterinarian

Exquisitely drawn tales of the fate we all face: hope vs. reality. Love vs. aloneness. The desire to connect vs. the lonely human journey. Brilliant, insightful and touching, Mary Bess Dunn’s new book of linked stories, Fate Havens leaves the reader thinking about the meaning of his own choices, her own life. A beautiful, insightful volume you won’t soon forget.

—Jennie Fields, author of The Age of Desire

Best Selling Author

Mary Bess Dunn

After retiring from a career as a teacher educator at Tennessee State University, Mary Bess Dunn continues to follow her lifelong passion for literature and writing. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in several literary journals, including The Alembic, Pembroke Magazine, and Quiddity International Literary Journal. Mary Bess is an avid cyclist who also enjoys yoga, pickleball, travel, playing the piano and hugging the grandkids. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Fate Havens

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