In his childhood memoir Railwayman"s Son, Hugh Hawkins found himself resisting a strong temptation to tweak memories for the benefit of narrative form, to make a better story. Now, in The Escape of the Faculty Wife and Other Stories, Hawkins has set remembered incidents and people loose to become the germ of fiction. Spanning the decades from World War II to the Iraq War, the ten stories in this collection are grouped not by chronology, but by locale: campus, hilltown, barracks. One, labeled memoir, relies heavily on detailed recall. In the others, Hawkins has given his imagination free rein. While not, strictly speaking, history, the stories reveal something of the moods and emotions of the recent past, times alternately turbulent and tranquil.