SEEING SOMEONE

Frank Stiles, straight, middle-aged, widowed New Jersey suburbanite has timeless wants—for acceptance, romance, and relief from his life’s monotonous grip. After taking a six-month leave from his job, declaring “he needs some air,” he meets Sierra Rose, a much younger transgender graduate student from Brooklyn struggling to make ends meet. From their vastly different worlds, Frank and Sierra begin an unexpected relationship with benefits. While Frank’s attraction to Sierra deepens, he feels he has no choice but to hide his attraction from the judgments of others, especially his ever-disapproving daughter. Yet, a growing connection between Frank and Sierra leads to both new perils and new realizations about themselves.

"It’s fair to say that Seeing Someone is a “novel of pursuit,” so insistent is the theme of pursuing throughout the story, but the novel is more truly the story of a quest—Frank’s quest, his search, for who he really finally is. And Sierra!—she leaves in the reader’s mind, and on the reader’s heart, an imprint as indelible as the memory she leaves with Frank.  Of prickly independence for all her vulnerability, fast-tongued and straightforward, yet with her own private side—Berman is a wizard at writing dialogue!—Sierra yearns for acceptance in a hostile world which she hasn’t yet found. This is the opening novel of a fully realized writer. Berman takes us captive with his pacing of Frank’s story, with his effortless sharpness in delineating his characters, both major and minor, with his “smartness” as a writer—and, too, with the empathy so beautifully supporting it. This book will enlarge you.” — Richard Wertime, author of Citadel on the Mountain; A Memoir of Father and Son, recipient of the James Michener Prize

Publishing date: March14, 2022

Language: ‎English

Paperback: ‎222 pages

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1-956635-96-6

Dimensions: ‎ 6 x 0.51 x 9 inches

Cliff Berman is a former newspaper reporter and staff writer at Good Housekeeping magazine in New York. He is the recipient of a Solstice Award in journalism. His short stories and articles have been published in numerous magazines and journals. Seeing Someone is his debut novel.