In this daring, and often dazzling, collection of stories, David Huddle gently scrutinizes the marvelous complexities (and endless permutations) of male-female encounters. In doing so, he again confirms his place among those few writers who can unfailingly capture, with a wry eye and unvarnished prose, both the most monumental and the most minute meetings between the sexes, those vertiginous moments that can change the directions of our lives (and can also pass unnoticed until many years after the event). Here is thirteen-year-old Angela on a trip to Scotland, experiencing the first ache of adolescence while falling in love with a black male model. And here is a professor caught in his study with a female student stretched out on his desk - nude. Huddle is always measuring that fine tension between fidelity and infidelity, that line between probity and license. He doesn't sit as a judge, but records these moments with both art and grace in a sweet and subtle prose that is guileless and wholly believable. Whether his subject is an aerobics instructor bent on revenge, or a chance, and sexually intimate, encounter on an airplane, David Huddle is a writer who is always in complete control, always managing to expose new facets in the ageless and fascinating terrain of male-female topography.