IN THESE WITHERINGLY funny, painfully acute stories about gay life, Michael Arditti shows himself to be of a different generation from writers such as Alan Hollinghurst and Philip Hensher: someone who was, from the evidence of these stories, too agonised to enjoy the hedonism of the pre-Aids gay scene in the 1980s, and whose sensibility makes him as much preoccupied with issues of class, art and emotion as with sex.

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