"Writing fiction about Aids calls for a sustained effort of adjustment, but then so does everything else to do with the epidemic." So writes Adam Mars-Jones in his introduction to this brave and astonishing book, whose eloquence confers a subtle human dimension on an immense, often faceless crisis.

In stories that unfold quietly, with familiarity and domesticity, he assembles a remarkable cast of characters - all of whom are dealing, either peripherally or explicitly, with the central disease of our time. Mars-Jones conveys the horrors of life during the plague through subversive fiction that aims to destroy the truly unconscionable notion of gay life as alien or other. Here are people - patients, lovers, even strangers - whom we recognize as our own, as family and friends.

Slim is a portrait of a volunteer 'buddy'- young, healthy, simple - as seen by the wracked man he accompanies. In An Executor we hear the ruminations of a man appointed to remove suspicious garments from a dying friend's closet, lest his grieving parents be shocked. Or in Summer Lightning, a bittersweet story of an unexpected death that comes while two friends sunbathe at the beach. An everyday accident that shatters a couple's carefully suspended brooding on mortality. A man's tape-recorded thoughts, in his last days, about the pleasures of his lovers, the advice of the hospital, and the slow dream-time he has fallen into: 'Imagination is the last thing to fail me.'. Each of these stories possesses its own startling force; their combined impact in this collection is staggering. As The Guardian has written, "Adam Mars-Jones is the Wilfrid Owen of the new long-drawn and deadly trench warfare ... He describes and exemplifies courage, tenderness and defiance."