Come Together

He "A one-night stand. No complications. Just another chalk mark on the board. A bit of harmless fun." She "You have no idea how much I hate being on my own." They are Jack and Amy, two twentysomething singles living in London, and the central characters in Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees's joint effort, Come Together . Jack is an artist who scrapes out a living by day working part-time in a gallery and prowls the bars by night looking to "pull." Amy is a temp with dreams of becoming a fashion designer. When the two meet at a party, they spend the whole night talking; both enjoy the conversation, but while Amy starts thinking that Jack "could well be my perfect man," his thoughts run along more basic lines--he wants to see her again because "I haven't had sex for over a week and you haven't had sex for over six months. Because, Amy, we therefore have a mutual need. And, yeah, because I fancy you, too." That last sentiment is important. Though Jack starts out trying to seduce Amy into a casual fling, he ends up falling for her hard. There's only one the little matter of the nude portrait he's doing of Sally McCullen, a drop-dead gorgeous blonde and former obsession. Told in alternating he said-she said chapters, Come Together is fairly predictable plot-wise, but the prose is effortlessly comical, the characters endearing, and the details of dating in the '90s hilariously spot-on. An added frisson of enjoyment comes from the fact that Lloyd and Rees became a couple themselves in the course of writing this novel. --Alix Wilber