Beauty's only skin deep

TOO BEAUTIFUL FOR YOU by Rod Liddle (Arrow, £6.99)

Helen is too cross about her broken window to notice her colleague is about to jump out of it. Eddie is getting a blow-job from his mother-inlaw while his wife buys an ice cream. Emily is smoking skunk in Stockwell and trying not to sleep with a tramp.

Such are the charmers who populate Rod Liddle's first stab at fiction, a rather ropey collection of short stories. A couple hit the mark, like the comedy about an adulterous lecturer who loses his arm in a train crash near Stevenage, then staggers to Uttoxeter because that is where he told his wife he would be.

And Liddle proves a dab hand at locations: the office, the park, a nightclub whose gimmick is live sheep - one hides in the gents looking "traumatised and borderline litigious".

But his take on youth smacks more of nostalgia than cred, and the only emotion with which he seems really at home is a kind of weary misanthropy.