Fifty years ago, Alfred Hayes was regarded as one of the most interesting and original American novelists, and he deserves to be better known. Set in the Manhattan bar scene in the forties, a middle aged man tells a young woman, whom he has just met, the story of his last love affair: a relationship in the thoroughly modern sense, full of misplaced lust and misunderstood emotion in which the boy was moody and evasive and the girl was even worse, a relationship that was mostly erratic, depressing and dysfunctional. Seemingly sinking without a trace, it is thrown into relief by the intervention of an unscrupulous millionaire. The ensuing turmoil will be recognisable to anyone who has fallen into - and then out of - a relationship. "In Love" is as much an indictment of love as an elegy to it, an examination of heartbreak rather than the heart.