A heartbroken derelict. An abruptly idealistic executive. A father trying to reconnect with his daughters. Three men inhabiting the same neighbourhood with completely divergent lives come together in a collision that will leave each of them changed forever. In his debut novel, Michael Knox evokes, in cinematic prose, a glimpse of the complexity of the suburban, and a meditation on disaster and masculinity. Harshly Purring presents a poetic and brutal look at isolation and disaster, both self-inflicted and otherwise, and the ways in which human beings struggle to survive it.