AustLit

'What makes a man? In this collection of short stories, Pierz Newton John moves through the full range of masculine experience: first touch of a woman's body, the deep love of a father separated from his child, opportunism mixed up with loneliness and internet dating, the casual violence of young boys, passage from young rebels to suburbanites. In these stories, it always comes back to emotion - tenderness, warmth, alienation, treachery.

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. (Publisher's blurb)