Unsafe Attachments, By Caroline Oulton</B>

Caroline Oulton's first collection of short stories is an oddity: in these crowded times, when new books bustle bossily for attention, Unsafe Attachments delivers so much more than it promises. The back cover hints vaguely that it's nothing more than a guidebook for the aspirationally unfaithful. But the stories loiter disturbingly in the memory, a terrific compendium of messy lives, betrayals, heartbreaks and tragedies.

The stories overlap beautifully. Characters who have walk-on roles in one saga are the stars of another. Dinah appears three times and is, I suspect, the woman with whom Oulton identifies most closely. Dinah is a senior television producer working in police drama. She has young children and has recently been abandoned by her partner. Oulton herself has worked in television drama for more than 20 years and is the author of the memoir Dumped! A Single Mother Shoots from the Hip, about how to cope when your partner walks out on you. It was hailed as the book that "will have every abandoned single mother in tears and stitches, and all other women cheering from the sidelines". When it comes to describing the anguish of betrayal, Oulton knows exactly what she's talking about.

This is Oulton's first attempt at fiction and reading her prose can feel like being coshed on the back of the head with a brick in a sock. In the story "Television Sex", Dinah and her staff are making a police drama. Oulton describes the show as "very male – whaddya expect from a cop show – with a token woman who was tough and able to handle herself, natch, but oh so easy on the eye and oh so much more lateral than her foul-mouthed hard-nut colleagues with their hard nuts, leather jackets and shades". It's the prose equivalent of GBH. But assault by sub-clause is thankfully rare in this collection.

Unsafe Attachments is filled with women of a certain age united by the worry that they should no longer expose the wobbly flesh of their upper arms. But they're not all wronged women, abandoned by their men. There is Abi, who risks her hard-won career as a civil servant by having an affair with a journalist. There is the creepy paedo-phile Carey, who plans a revolting revenge on his informers. There is Lindy, who becomes fixated by the diary of a woman who in another story has an abortion. And there is egocentric Jeanette, whose casual affair uncorks a tragedy.

The thread that lashes all these stories together is, of course, infidelity. But there is something else, and that's the impact they have on the reader. From start to finish I felt a low-level dread that something terrible was about to happen. A couple of pages from the end I began to relax. It was going to be fine after all. The poor mild-mannered man in the final story would muddle through. Wouldn't he? And then, unflinchingly, Caroline Oulton pulled the weapon out of her bag.