YOU NEVER KNOW by Isabel Huggan...

YOU NEVER KNOW by Isabel Huggan (Penguin: $9.95; 241 pp.). Huggan’s sharply observed stories depict middle-aged women examining their lives to discover what became of their hopes, plans and expectations. In “Throwing and Catching,” an idealistic woman, disillusioned by her experiences in college, finds her life entangled with a retarded neighbor she knew as a child. Returning to the remote Hebrides village where she spent an idyllic summer, the narrator of “Knowing People” ponders, “Why we enter each other’s lives and how we are meant to fit together is more than is given us to know. And yet that’s what we want, isn’t it? That’s what we want to understand.”