Fault Lines is partly an exploration of contemporary masculinity – single fatherhood, post-divorce loneliness; adolescent confusion; and especially desire – which can be both lovely and sinister, as in one of the best stories, ‘Shock’, about the deceptive seduction of a young woman: ‘He has her now, under his fingers … The zip parts like a ripping fruit, and he slides his hand in deep, all the way to the pulp.’ Common experiences of childhood and youth are invoked – the unbearable responsibility for killing an animal, running away, loving a sibling – and the emotion in them is distilled in the prose, and coaxed in the reader.

Under this author’s searching lens, fate and agency are examined, and inexorable processes are observed close up. In ‘Salt’ there is a dying old man: ‘The cancer that had started in his lungs had cauliflowered through his body, every scan revealing some new cluster of florets blossoming in the viscera.’ Human relationships are described in the empiric vernacular of science, and characters meet on an atomic level, where they ‘collide’ but do not connect. People hurdle around each other, looking for a place to rest.