Indelible Acts — A.L. Kennedy

The love story (as well as the story of love lost, obsessed over, or longed for) gets a complete and thrilling renovation at the hands of the most virtuosic literary stylist to appear in the British Isles since Jeanette Winterson. A. L. Kennedy's men and women huddle in foreign hotel rooms, immobilized by travel-sickness and betrayal. They plan seductions on the line at a cheese shop. They're undone by a passing embrace in the office men's room. Their passion is so urgent and imperious that it invades the stories they tell their children.

By turns chaste and ferociously sexy, funny and unbearably sad, every story in Indelible Acts is a testament to the lengths to which desire drives us. And all are marked by Kennedy's wisdom and humanity, and language that captures the briefest tremor of the infatuated heart.