Fidelity: Stories - Tapa blanda

"Michael Redhill is a writer of considerable humanity and insight." -- A.L. Kennedy, author of On Bullfighting, Original Bliss and Everything You Need

Praise for Martin Sloane

"Art and life collide in [an] explosive debut. . . . Redhill's language is masterful; imagery and metaphor rise organically out of each event and picture. . . . The pacing of the writing is marvellous, and conscious of the heaviness of history." -- The Globe and Mail

"Redhill's book, not unlike the later stories of Henry James, is a work of fiction in which thoughts speak more loudly than words and the distinction between art and life is the story's real mystery." -- The San Francisco Chronicle

"Michael Redhill's first novel seems destined to become a small classic, one of those books handed from friend to friend. . . . With this luminous, wonderful book, Michael Redhill highlights the complexities of human relationships in profound and unexpected ways." -- Books in Canada

From acclaimed poet and Giller-nominated 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.