Seven intense and perceptively written descriptions of loneliness, puberty and boyhood dreams, of relationships between parents and their children, men and women, old and young, relationships marked by shame and feelings of guilt, by yearnings and a sense of loss. With his spare style, buoyed by meticulously precise language, the author endows his readers with a deep psychological understanding of the ways in which people seek to repress their longings by recourse to substitutes. Breiteig’s stories are in the nature of a quest for a modicum of meaning in incidents of a surprising, baffling and ambiguous nature.