Verging on Love (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781913438685)

Verging On Love consists of four novellas about love affairs that break down, owing not only to the incompatible personalities involved, but also to the inherent instability caused by the circumstances.

In Lost In Jericho, two cultured men find themselves in relationships with women in the grip of mental illness, but only one of the men has enough sympathy and empathy to bother trying to make his relationship work. The story is told largely through conversations between the two men in pubs in their home city, Oxford.

An Artist's Impression might be described as a tale of unrequited love, though it might more fittingly be classed as a story of mutual ardour (between an artist and his subject) in which one of those involved refuses to cross a professional boundary, much as he is tempted to do so.

Day That He Loved is another story set in Oxford and features two relationships between women undergraduates and older men. The two women discover that their respective partners know each other, an unlikely friendship given the starkly different backgrounds of the two men, and that they have been having furtive meetings; intriguingly, they scheme to uncover the reasons for the assignations, only to find out that they have been occasioned by dark and sinister motives.

Courting Disaster brings the reader back to Oxford and the incongruous liaison between a cultured man and a simple woman, a relationship made even more perverse for being one between a man who has just successfully defended himself in court, having been accused of murder, and one of the members of the jury. The couple embark on a darkly surreal "romance". Then death intrudes. But at whose hands?