These staccato stories are like virtuoso pieces for a remote control generation. Zap! come the one-liners. Zap! an entire scenario materialises in a couple of brief sentences. Zap! here we go again. The territory is familiar; love and its myriad betrayals, the battle - war, rather - between the sexes, the misery of modern life as viewed through the least romantic lens imaginable. Fay Weldon seems to have an endless supply of vitriolic observations up her sleeve, and can produce them with a magician's flourish, and just as well, too, in case by any chance we ever get comfortable or complacent.
Arminta Wallace
