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.

If you are a heterosexual reader, you might well have stopped there, for much modern gay fiction has been deliberately written for a limited audience. One can understand the historical reasons for this, while almost regretting the loss of the kind of repression that produced the art of Wilde, Proust