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 judgements 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


Cliff Berman is a former newspaper reporter and staff writer at Good Housekeeping magazine in New York. He is 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.



Title: Seeing Someone
Author: Cliff Berman
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Publisher Website: https://adelaidebooks.org/
Publisher Email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1956635966
Price: $19.60
Page Count: 222 pages
Format: Paperback

Description of the company: ADELAIDE BOOKS LLC is a New York based independent company dedicated to publishing literary fiction and creative nonfiction. It was founded in July 2017 as an imprint of the Adelaide Literary Magazine, with the aim to facilitate publishing of novels, memoirs, and collections of short stories, poems, and essays by contributing authors of our magazine and other qualified writers.We believe that in doing so, we best fulfill the mission outlined in Adelaide Magazine – “to promote writers we publish, helping both new and emerging, and established authors reaching a wider literary audience.”

Our motto is: We don’t publish classics, we make classics.