Temporary Shelter is a collection of twenty expertly crafted short stories by Mary Gordon. The characters here are of diverse ages, classes, and nationalities, yet all are alike in their desperate need of safe harbor. A crippled girl must contend not only with disability, but also with her toxic mother and aunts, who block her on the path to maturity. Elsewhere, a woman afflicted by a fearful anxiety that has given her a “death in life” grapples with how not to pass the same curse on to her daughter.