Out winding Foxcroft Road, past the horse farms and historic estates north of Middleburg, in the decidedly rural village of Unison, lives Loudoun County writer John Rolfe Gardiner. Genial and calm, Gardiner, whose newest book of short stories, The Magellan House, has recently been published, is thoroughly a part of the ground on which he walks, lives and writes. His fiction is interwoven with the history of northern Virginia, and especially of the on-going tension between preservation and development, of the line between suburban and rural.

Gardiner has observed this tension from a standpoint of relative stability. He and his wife, the artist Joan Gardiner, have lived in their 250-year-old house in Unison for 30 years.

Before that, Gardiner, who was born in New York City to a literary mother and a father who would ultimately serve the government in the 1950s as a foreign service official, grew up in McLean before the advent of strip malls and housing developments, attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, and then graduated from Amherst College.

After college, he moved back to DC, where he wrote for business and trade magazines until 1968. After researching and writing about the riots at the political conventions in that year of upheaval, Gardiner realized that his Dupont Circle neighborhood was vulnerable to burglars and tear gas, and he decided to quit city life for the bucolic pleasures of the Virginia countryside, first moving to Waterford, then to Bluemont, and, finally, to Unison.

Gardiner met Joan while working on a construction job on her property in Unison. They married in 1976 and had a daughter a few years later. The Gardiners were able to serve their respective artistic interests well in this rural setting thanks to Joan's low mortgage payments and John's carpentry skills – he did most of the remodeling the house needed, and he built a studio for Joan's ceramics and a writing cabin for himself.

Today, Gardiner's writing cabin contains an old-fashioned black typewriter on an antique desk, some empty bookshelves, a hardbacked chair and one wallhanging: a frame containing an award from the Mark Twain Society, which he received in 1976 for his first novel. He no longer uses the typewriter, having converted – grudgingly, it seems - to a computer in the mid-90s, nor does he use the cabin as often as he once did. Gardiner now tends to write in his fully modernized office – complete with Internet access, fax machine, and photocopier – instead.

This recent modernization of his mode of writing does not mean, however, that Gardiner has changed his unique style of writing. The stories in The Magellan House are set in such far-flung places as America, Portugal, Canada, England, Norway, and the French Luberon and Pyrenees, but at their heart lie the elements that have made Gardiner's voice distinct in the past – a sense of place and an ability to write about pivotal moments of change in people's lives.

Many of these stories are based on actual events and experiences from Gardiner's life, as well as from the lives of his close friends. The title story stems from Gardiner and his family's 1988 stay in Portugal, a country still haunted by the Salazar government 15 years after its overthrow. Two families struggle over a revolutionary's spoils, each stunted in its own way by 50 years of tyranny in which everyone was an informer for the regime. "The Voyage Out," anthologized in Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize stories, is based on the two English schoolboys who came to wait out World War II with Gardiner's family after their headmaster had been killed by a stray German bomb. Their Atlantic crossing and its aftermath are imagined in this story.

Other stories include subjects as diverse as American art-school culture abroad during the 1990s; the psychology of the headmistress of a girls' boarding school; the lives of "water-hippies," living on boats in the Anacostia River during the 1960s when revolution was in the air in Washington; the ins and outs of the antiquarian book dealing business; and the "tragic mischief" done in America by recovered-memory enthusiasts from 1985-1995, who convinced thousands of children that they had been sexually abused, thereby ruining the lives of many innocent adults.

Critics in the past have called Gardiner's prose rich, thoughtful, and tight, while quiet enough to allow the reader to truly understand the characters he so carefully develops. While his past books have for the most part been set in fictional Stilson County, in northern Virginia, Gardiner reaches beyond his Blue Ridge setting with The Magellan House and achieves what readers have come to expect from him – a group of stories that are character-based, moving, truthful and illuminating.

John Gardiner will be reading from The Magellan House and signing copies of the book on Friday, October 29, at 5:30 pm at the Purcellville Train Station.