‘Then, for the forty minutes that were theirs, they spoke of love: as it had been for them, as it still was, of its confinements, necessarily so, its intensity too, its pain, the mockery it had so often felt like, how they had never wasted it by sitting in silence in the dark of a cinema or sleeping through the handful of nights they’d spent together in her flat. They had not wasted it is lovers’ quarrels, or lovers’ argument. The did not waste it now, in what they said … ‘

This is the author’s first collection of short stories since the award-winning ‘The Hill Bachelors’ was published in 2000. Tender, touching and beautifully humane, the dozen new stories contained here explore the subject of adultery, and tell of secret passions, domestic infidelities, office romances, and the broken and unbroken rules of love.