Bullet Holes

A Powerful Novel About Family, Grief, and the Divides That Shape America

It’s the weekend of Manny Perlmutter’s bar mitzvah, and his family is gathering in suburban Philadelphia to celebrate. But beneath the rituals, speeches, and carefully arranged festivities, grief is everywhere. Less than a year earlier, Manny’s twin brother, Danny, was killed in a school shooting. Now, as relatives and guests arrive, Danny’s absence threatens to overwhelm a family already strained by political, religious, and emotional fault lines.

Gary and Pauline Perlmutter once believed love could survive any disagreement. He is a conservative supporter of the Second Amendment and traditional values; she is a liberal Democrat who believes passionately in gun control, abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. For years, they built a warm home despite their differences. But after Danny’s death, those differences no longer feel abstract. They have become personal, painful, and impossible to ignore.

Told from multiple points of view, Bullet Holes explores the emotional aftermath of tragedy, the burden of survivor’s guilt, and the difficulty of listening across ideological divides. As Manny struggles to step into a moment meant to mark his coming of age, the adults around him are consumed by their own sorrow, anger, and resentment. What should be a celebration becomes a reckoning.

A timely and deeply human novel, Bullet Holes holds up a mirror to contemporary American society and asks what is lost when families, communities, and a nation stop seeing one another clearly.

Discover Bullet Holes today.

Excerpt from the book

Morning. Before even lifting her eyelids, she could discern its cursed rays streaming in from around the folds of the drapes. Another day. By all rights the sun should have ground to a halt, banishing itself to the farthest reaches of the galaxy after that hateful afternoon. But instead, it merely retreated in shame each evening, only to reassert itself insolently the next hopeless morning to increase her torment.

Glancing dully over to her left, she observed the empty pillow and exhaled, the knot of tension in her neck loosening somewhat. Gary was gone already. He’d been leaving for work stealthily lately, no longer trying to interact. It was better that way, she reflected, as she slowly, wearily, sat upright at the edge of the king-sized mattress, her shoulders slouched, her palms flattened against the ice-grey percale sheets for support. As always, she was conscious of the faint traces of a dull headache, which never left her, like a permanent hangover from a party she could not recall having ever attended. Slowly, she massaged her temples with her fingertips in a vain attempt to banish the pain.

Sometimes she believed nights were the worst. The dark, interminable, excruciating nights, when sleep eluded her and she was alone in her mind with his cherubic face, his screams of anguish, all the useless, precious, haunting memories. When no matter how she shifted in bed, no matter how tightly she shut her eyes or buried her head beneath the pillow, there was no escape from the agony, from the guilt. When she could only pray for daylight to distract her, to release her from her sepulchral brooding. But, in truth, mornings were infinitely harder. Having to face the world and go through the motions, the pantomime playacting of a normal life, as if anything mattered, when there was no hope and never would be again. When everyone was watching her, judging her, fussing about her like some kind of patient. Is Pauline okay? Is there something we can do for her? We just need to give her a mission, a sense of purpose. As if she could ever care about anything or anyone again. Their well-intended ministrations only compounded her pain. Besides, she knew what some of them were thinking. She wasn’t the first woman ever to have lost a child and wouldn’t be the last. She’d eventually get over it. Time heals all wounds. Only she didn’t want to get over it. Didn’t want to heal.

Mornings, when she had to tend to her children like any other mother. Feeding them, now that she no longer worked, feigning interest in their activities, giving them lifts, all without breaking down and screaming, howling at the savage cruelty of this world. And if she managed to survive the paralyzing agony of another day, the children, Gary, her only reward was another sleepless night.