"A Single Awe" introduces Dana, a married woman tormented by adulterous thoughts.

Her husband is a good but dull man, and the selfless act of heroism that won her love also revealed her own limitations. With unadorned but dramatic, economical prose, Coake explores the human capacity for altruism and cowardice in these high-stakes tales. A Single Awe - a woman who once wasn't sure her college boyfriend was the right man, ends up marrying him after he becomes a hero and looks back at her choices In A Single Awe, at a Christmas party, a wife realizes she no longer likes the husband she fell in love with and married because he saved a mother in a terrible accident and suffered burns as a result. The other story, A Single Awe, dances with the death of a marriage and the death of love. The main character, Dana, considers her husband on the evening one of her husbands employees makes a pass at her. She is stunned by his kiss, but more shocked at her response in return. In Dana we all see ourselves, either today or tomorrow, facing the mortality of our relationships or wondering if our integrity will see us through, or if we will succumb to the tantalizing taste of the forbidden dare. Coake is an emotional writer using a variety of senses to speak to the reader. Here is an excerpt from In the Event: She smelled like bar smoke, like distant beers. He liked it that was the smell of a gig, of people laughing, and the feeling he got when the band first kicked it in and the whoop went up from the crowd. Of his own sore fingers picking up a cold bottle afterward. Coake takes the reader to his dimension, a dimension of fear and emotional death. His use of the right word at the right time, even the tempo of the language, is poetic in its presence. The corresponder