Happiness by Denis Robert

Oh, and he's married, too. They are exquisitely French — clever, perverse, bored senseless by ordinary life.

They meet in a bar and something electrifies them. "She crossed her legs so high that I could see the white triangle of her pants." That's what he says. Very Frenchly, he also points out that he knew that she knew that he was looking at her pants. The trick of this book is that it's narrated by both the man and the woman. She says, "He attracted me, but I felt no desire for him." Soon she feels desire and a throbbingly intense affair follows. You'll read it in a lunchtime.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

He's 39, a writer, dried up and waiting for better days. She's ten years younger, an arts graduate, not doing anything much. Both married, both bored. Lust at first sight. And so they fuck each other and keep fucking each other, just about everywhere in just about every way, and their desire increases. They explore every facility available to intensify their excitement; toys and films and vodka and cocaine, and peep-shows, exhibitionism and voyeurism.Drugged on each other, they want more. They don't talk much. But they do keep notes. Hers fill the left-hand pages of this short, shattering novel, his the right. Alternately dazed and lucid, shrewd and bewildered, they provide a precise description of sexual passion, its smells and tastes, fluids and stains. Of the rest of their lives, they record a few fading fragments: names of designers, novelists, singers; some stray ideas and concepts, and brief scenes from their marriages like clips from old films. Their erotic journey begins in a hotel room, and ends in a toilet cubicle. Happiness is not a love story.