This collection visits everyday characters who, like us, are caught in the confusing and sometimes violent intersection of morality, war, religion, medical ethics, race, spiritual emergence, and for-profit Western culture. The title of this book comes from the art of reading tea leaves as divination or fortune-telling. One could think of these stories as acting as a kind of fortune-telling for where Western culture is heading as the 21st Century unfolds. Most of these stories occur in contemporary urban America; the people are the dispossessed middle class looking for meaning and purpose in a world that seems to have lost both; the themes are as evocative as the language -- love, brutality, tenderness, humour, forgiveness and redemption, death and rebirth. Written with skill and phenomenal attention to language, these are highly emotional stories that juxtapose the grandeur and insignificance of the human condition, the honour in the struggle to find meaning in our lives, and the potential for terror and salvation that exist in every life.