With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire's Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It's the beginning of a remarkable friendship...

Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. But now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up and she is putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing for it -- Frank has to go. But go where? And do what? Frank has been on heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even...

From the very beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. At sex, he is not a natural, being shy and frightened of women, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, his game improves.

Karl Leon Forelock is a product of the northern English town of Partington and a graduate with a double starred first in the Moral Decencies. Sent to Sydney on a CIA bursary on a mission to teach the Australians how to live, Leon quickly discovers that there are some natives who believe that they have an education to pass on in return.

Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century -- and by Barney as a 'prurient little Victorian ratbag'. This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her 'rampant marvellings', to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the...

Marvin Kreitman lives for sex, or at least he lives for women. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie. Once a week, the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have - about fidelity and womanising, and which makes happier.

Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organized games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime, he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalization can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the...

One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Divine intervention? Or his late father's love nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change. Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood, his tragic great aunt Marghanita for whom Henry once entertained a dangerous passion, and his father Izzi, upholsterer turned illusionist,...

Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one is much interested. He is drawn into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release. This book is a comedy of cataclysm.

Felix is a happy man. He runs a bookshop in London, and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful. After their honeymoon in Florida, Felix went from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else.