A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter (Harvill, £6.99 in UK

First published in 1967 in the New Yorker, Salter's taut, elegiac narrative manages to beguile the reader - if ultimately to the point of suffocation, such is its intensity. It is set in France in the 1950s. A lone American chooses to abandon Paris for a remote village, where he borrows a wealthy friend's country house. A younger American also arrives in the area, and begins an exclusively physical affair with a young local girl. The relationship is described with an intimate, almost obsessive exactness by the narrator who imagines their love-making with a voyeuristic combination of detached wonder and envy. The prose is limpid, elegant, mannered; the tone is restrained, even cryptic. Salter's sad, passionate yet passionless, determinedly European, romance impresses without ever fully engaging the emotions.