The Bleeding Heart, by Marilyn French (Virago, £6.99 in UK)

Is it possible to take a year out and have an affair which must end twelve months later? It sounds more like Mills & Boon than Marilyn French, and if this book weren't so doggedly didactic, if might make a fine romance. Dolores and Victor, two Americans working in England, meet on a train and fall passionately in love despite the fact that he is married, she has given up on relationships. The narrative ploughs relentlessly through the obligatory examinations of marriage, infidelity, passion, misery, ecstasy and the rest, but the characters have the distracted air of cyphers and the whole exercise is as frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying as the kind of relationship it so minutely dissects.