"And the years rolled by at an alarming rate" by Nicola Daly (Gatehouse Press)

A prose pamphlet, between A5 and A6. About 40 pages. Short episodes - lists sometimes. The setting's initially Paris. Here's the start -

In my youth, I dreamed of slepping with men other women wanted. In my twenties, I slept with a man who had an affinity with photocopiers. Later, I slept with feral men who sniffed around like cats. Now I have compassion fatigue.

After a wedding dress fitting, the first-person narrator breaks off her engagement to a French environmentalist to be with her American lover Michael, who has a PhD in philosophy, and who she refers to as "you".

She has an unsatisfying job. 'Do you like your job?' my boss asked, after I brought him back the wrong sandwich from the deli. Then he touched my bottom.

They move to the country, back to England. She wants to get pregnant - "We tried exercise yoga, a cabbage diet and a ritual involving ice cubes". The child dies soon after birth. She's in deep grief longer than he is. They return to the city. Then Camille is born. "Then somehow I lost a huge chunk of time and when I bothered to open my eyes I was a mother of two."

He has sex with the au-pair. At 45 he has a friend, Orla, who's also his lover. She's often on TV. "What I disliked most about Orla was the way she looked at me as if I was a character from a song by The Smiths." At 46 he has a stroke, and is put on life-support.

She tries to summarise her life, finds thematic threads, thinks back to when they were in therapy, when he left her with the words "I need to be with somebody who understands me", when he returned to her. They moved to France, away from temptation.

While he's in a coma a piano tuner visits the house. They have sex. At the end she's at Michael bedside - "But this is not the end of our story. We have days, weeks, decades, even light years ahead of us yet."