The characters in Jess Walter's short stories have cheated on their wives and girlfriends. They've embezzled money and had their children taken into care. Some of them are trying to make amends. A recovering addict begs on the streets for money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. A convicted ex-trader does community service in a local school. Heavy on poverty, illness and addiction, We Live in Water contains none of the glamour of Walter's 2012 novel, Beautiful Ruins, which moved between present-day Hollywood and 1960s Italy. Many of the stories take place in the north-west United States: Seattle, Portland and Walter's hometown of Spokane, Washington. But like the earlier novel, We Live in Water deals unsparingly and sympathetically with men – and it is all men – struggling with bad choices and failed ambition. The final story, which consists of 50 numbered paragraphs mixing statistics about Spokane with Walter's own ambivalent feelings about the city, sets his characters' lives against a wider and inescapable culture of deprivation, crime and abuse. In the title story, a father watches his young son standing in front of a fish tank, staring at the fish trapped by its glass walls. "We ain't like fish, Michael," he says. "You can do whatever you want." He knows as well as Walter does that it isn't true.

We Live in Water is published by Viking (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.19 with free UK p&p