Set within music and choral singing, Sheffer's stories are filled with human frailty and gentle humor. Each story focuses, to one degree or another, on the elusiveness of perfection, the compromises that musicians must always make. "Music of the Inner Lakes is a tightly knit but beautifully modulated collection of stories about the loss and recovery of music, a metaphor for aging and remembrance, death and rebirth. When the hand cannot play, when the voice cracks, when the choir begins to disintegrate, that is the exact moment Mr. Sheffer begins his deft exploration of one life's ending, another's turning toward new commitments and love."-Eugene Garber, author of Metaphysical Tales and The Historian: Six Fantasies of the American Experience "The music here is the singing of the human spirit: most often a solitary voice, plaintive, urgent, heartbreaking-sometimes a little off-key, but no less compelling.... Occasionally, voices will blend into a perfect chord, even a perfect song, before the singers separate back into exile. 'I only want to sing beautiful music: says one. In this collection, Roger Sheffer does just that."-William Trowbridge, author of O Paradise