A dark surprise

Two friends meet for lunch to work out which of them is more miserable. Is it Martin, the squat, Jewish, impressively adulterous "luggage baron of south London"? Or Charlie, a lumbering children's author so sick of safe marital sex that he's started ogling girls young enough, as Martin says, "to be your readers"?

Charlie proposes a wife swap to cheer them both up. Martin declines, but Jacobson has other plans, enforced with the help of a puckish cycle courier who ploughs into Charlie later that day.

Jacobson is easy to bash but impossible not to admire. Martin can be so fussily drawn that you are left gasping for air, yet he is still an awesomely odd creation. Women may be short-changed, but men are hardly left quids-in.

Save for one turn too perverse at the end, Who's Sorry Now? is a triumph of dark surprise.