With HUNTS IN DREAMS,Tom Drury returns to the American Midwest -- the setting of his acclaimed first novel, THE END OF VANDALISM. He tells the powerful, nuanced, and often funny story of one October weekend in the lives of a precarious family. Everyone in HUNTS IN DREAMS wants something without knowing quite how to get it. Charles Darling covets an heirloom shotgun and will break the law, if necessary, to retrieve it. Joan Gower is drifting away from her marriage to Charles, hoping to reclaim an imaginative life. Their young son, Micah, prowls an empty town at night, testing the scope and reliability of his world. And Joan's daughter Lyris, after sixteen years as an orphan, seeks only a stable footing from which to begin the "perilous journey to adulthood." Sometimes together, sometimes independently, father, mother, son, and daughter move through a series of vivid encounters that demonstrate how even the most provisional family can endure in its own particular way.