"Local Stop in the Promised Land" is the story of a single block in Upper Westside Manhattan in a time line extending from the end of the 19th century to the late 1950's. It portrays some twenty-odd characters, tenement dwellers, as well as merchants, occupying ground floor shops and follows them through the arcs of their intertwining, occasionally colliding lives. In the context of the novel, disparate characters appear as isolate as shards in the universe and yet they are all components of the same cosmic scheme. Each has its seasons: For all of them there is a struggling early growth as in spring, followed by a balmy, illusory summer, an accumulation of yellowy orange days inducing a sense of lost awareness, a timeless expanse when there seemed to be no past or tomorrow but only a lulling, unending present, and whole years drift by almost unnoticed. Then a raw wind blows from the north. Skins pebble and harden like lemon rinds. Furnaces cough into activity, belching soot over the block in a peppery mist. And a breath of air is laden with the unmistakable acrid reek of winter.