Darling?

In the opening story of this collection of very fresh and funny stories the narrator's husband tells her that he has realized that he is married to "the wrong woman...he felt a dreadful disappointment. He wouldn't have brought it up but... I'd started complaining that he never tells me anything really important." "When you marry you take a share in someone else nightmares; this was something I hadn't known." Such shocks and recognition's are the lot of many in these tales in which a remorseless, helpless awareness is redeemed by love.Plot summaries would give no hint of the comic range of the author. Her sharp eyed, insightful wit, pretension-puncturing satire, and astonished ironies are located in the deeps of human isolation, the waywardness of the desperate heart and the impasses desire leads us into. Beautifully told, poignant, and woefully, hilariously true.

I bought this because of the Times review, and thought it was even better than they said. It races along with something surprising, heartbreaking, or hilarious around every corner and all written in an elegant, almost British, style. (A single sentence sometimes makes you catch your breath.) So much modern fiction just lies there on the page, confirming the conventional wisdoms, but these stories are really rooted in the subtle and complex relations between their characters, and often in the subtle, complex relations between one character's heart and mind. Made me think of Colette, of Woolf...passions and fascinations precisely rendered. I found myself thinking differently because I read this book. There's a wide range of subjects here and some people might feel jarred by the shifts of tone, but for me it was great to discover someone-- especially a woman-- with such a strong and distinctive voice, and such deep feeling too.