The Steel Kiss — Alex Woolf

Each of these nine stories explores a symptom of that pathology we call love. We meet a volatile woman whose husband betrays her once too often; a man who takes advantage of an amnesiac girl; a woman prepared to break a man's spirit in order to win his heart; and a young man who obsesses about strangers on trains. We learn the corrosive power of secrets over the long course of a marriage, the way the pressure of years of conformity can explode in a single shocking act, and how love of the patriotic kind can, for a young soldier, end up brutalising the soul. By turns disturbing, funny, bittersweet and poignant, these are love stories of the darkest and most dangerous kind.