Fidelity

From acclaimed poet and Giller Prize-winning novelist Michael Redhill comes Fidelity, a subtle but searing collection of short fiction. By turns brooding, strange, and funny, Fidelity probes the blandishments of temptation, the swooning submission to concupiscence, the illusory redemption of desire, the ambivalence at the heart of the most intimate trust, and, most importantly, the irony that when we betray, we betray ourselves first. His characters are not monsters, or really even sinners. Their vulnerabilities are our own: a business-trip affair leaves a man changed in ways he cannot anticipate; a young girl's sexuality inflicts unexpected wounds on her family; the young amanuensis of a 156-year-old Civil War veteran tries to defend his hero from accusations of desertion; a father of four, pressured by his wife to undergo a vasectomy, gradually learns that he is capable of infidelity when he contemplates the intolerable loss of his virility. Spell-binding and crackling with an unflinching attention to emotional detail, Fidelity looks boldly at the transgressions of desire that seduce, and sometimes break, body and soul.