Like most people, Vic Mullan, habitual drug-user, professional layabout, and amoralist extraordinaire, can remember where he was and what he was doing on the day of Princess Diana's death. Yes, he can remember it particularly well: he was at home, beginning an affair with Emma, his best friend's wife.The opening sections of David Baddiel's second novel chart the history of an intense and passionately sexual liaison set against the background of the most hysterical - in both senses of the word - time in recent memory. But as the months wear on, and life and love return to normal, so things become more complex between Vic and Emma. And then, tragedy - a real, local, small-scale tragedy, as opposed to a national, iconic, mythological one - intervenes. Part-satire, part-love story, part-whodunnit, and part-meditation on the nature of sex and death, Whatever Love Means is truly a tale for our times

Gabriel Jacoby can't get to sleep. In fact, he can't get anywhere at all, either in his Triumph Dolomite or his life. Everything around him, from his large collection of coffee-machines to his balding Bradford-born flatmate, is breaking down. Not that Gabriel is bothered; he's too busy being in love with his intensely happily married brother's wife. Which is why Gabriel chooses to waste all his time - because he knows that whatever else he might achieve, it won't be happiness. There's no way there, when you're in love with your brother's wife. Unless you remember your brother's wife has a sister...