Fault Lines

What makes a man? In this collection of short stories, Pierz Newton-John moves through the full range of masculine experience, with an openness not afraid to show men at their most lonely, sexual, loving, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes abusive. First touch of a woman's body in a cold and foreign land, tender moments between father and son, the deep love of a father separated from his child, treachery and opportunism mixed up with loneliness and internet dating, the casual violence of young boys exploring the world, rites of passage from young rebels to comfortable suburbanites, and what men feel and think about women. In Pierz Newton John's stories, it always comes back to emotion, tenderness with children, warmth with wives after dreams of alienation, the pain of treacherous girlfriends, the loneliness of men. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose. . . the reader is lulled by the seamless prose, undercurrents of contemporary music, the urbane writing, the suburban settings, but it is all happening behind closed doors.