Davies’s stories plumb the depths of silence and estrangement, bringing up moments of extraordinary insight about what holds people together and what drives them apart. Death, love, and language do both. Couples exchange words or literally freeze each other out. Lovers disappear. A woman keeps her heart in a box to protect it from theft—and distance herself from pain incurred. Much of Davies’s art is in such details. The “muscled finger” with which an Amazon queen delivers a directive says a lot about leadership, while Queen Victoria’s “locked” mouth and “immovable frown” speak to what it’s like to be a leader. “Nobody tells me anything,” she confesses, and comes to life at the prospect of a story. If stories fill an essential human need for connection, could they redeem the world, or mitigate its harshness? “The Taking of Bunny Clay” raises the possibility, juxtaposing the life of a Haitian nanny with 9/11. The woman’s American employers see her only as “heavy, but reliable,” her face “placid, inscrutable, almost blank.” Had they followed up that “almost” they would have come to know a lonely young mother of three, away from home so long that her children “are too shy to speak to a stranger” when she calls. Globalism and economics are deft silencers. Writers like Davies, bringing to life criminals, Quakers, loners, and Charlotte Brontë, describe another vision of humanity, one based in the title work’s “light…that shines in every man.”