Fifty-year-old Susannah Nelson is returning to her hometown of Colville, Washington, to live with her mother, a recent widow who is having difficulties living alone. Susannah begins to regret some decisions she made in the past, including leaving her boyfriend, Jake, when she went abroad to go to school.

This collection of interconnected stories begins with the anarchist daughter of missionaries in Manhattan who runs away to be an activist and ends with a wealthy young adulterer in Paris who is outsmarted by the object of his desire.

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien...

"Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios,...

In this poignant and striking final chapter in the Duane Moore story, which began in 1966, McMurty takes readers on one last unforgettable journey to Thalia, Texas, a town that continues to change at a breakneck pace even as Duane feels himself slowing down. Returning home to recover from a near-fatal heart attack, Duane discovers that he has a new neighbor: the statuesque K. K. Slater, a quirky billionairess who's come to Thalia to open the Rhino...

"Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of goldfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning supplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her own body, and her wayward early twenties,...

Marnie didn't know much about miracles. Mistakes maybe. Accidents. And monstrous mess-ups. She knew a lot about those. But miracles? Those were for other people. When her sister dies and makes Marnie guardian of her Down syndrome son, pieces of her dismal past surface again.

"In the title story, "Funny Once," a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In "The Village," a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage son's relationship with a bad-news...

"Mandy Foster regrets her past. If anyone discovers her secret, tradition dictates she will be shunned. She's determined to guard her heart, even if it means a lifetime alone. Breaking from the Land's tradition, carpenter Levi Colburn is building his house outside the village; across the road from Mandy Foster to be exact. Though he hopes to marry Mandy someday, she rejected him once and has been unattainable to every man in the village ever since....