Take a Girl Like You: Selected Stories — Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis's most ambitious reckoning with his central theme -- the degradation of modern life -- Take a Girl Like You also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis's rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a girl from the North English country has come south to teach school in a small smug town where she hopes to find love and fortune. Jenny is independent, likable, optimistic, openhearted, intelligent, and exceedingly good-looking, but the men who flock around her are all too willing to overlook her virtues in the hopes of getting her in the sack. But then Jenny, though no prude, is set on remaining a virgin until marriage.

Jenny's fundamental, unshakeable decency and her determination to live life on her own terms -- though she is surrounded with a host of brilliantly rendered schemers and fools, male and female, but chiefly male -- are in the forefront of Amis's novel.