""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone...

A young American man, with the help of a local who speaks weirdly broken English, journeys to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II in a Ukrainian village that was ultimately razed by the Nazis.