Intimacy and Midnight All Day

Together in one volume -- Hanif Kureishi's highly acclaimed and controversial novel, "Intimacy, " and, available for the first time, his latest collection of provocative short stories, "Midnight All Day."

Jay, the narrator of "Intimacy, " tells his story on the night he is preparing to leave his lover, Susan, and their two boys. Stripping away all posturing and self-justification, Hanif Kureishi explores the fears and desires that drive a man to leave a woman. "Midnight All Day" is an astonishing, darkly comic collection of new stories, in which Kureishi confirms his reputation as one of our foremost chroniclers of the loveless, the lost and the dispossessed. The characters are familiar in the cultural landscape of the nineties: frustrated and intoxicated, melancholic and sensitive, yet capable of great cruelty, and if necessary, willing to break the constraints of an old life to make way for the new.