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I reviewed It’s Beginning to Hurt, by James Lasdun, for LAT:

It’s the ability to delude ourselves that Lasdun keeps coming back to, knowing it can lead only to a more horrible moment: when we realize that we should have noticed sooner how we were going wrong. (That’s perhaps truly clearest in “The Old Man,” where a fiancé has the dreadful realization that he’s about to marry a murderer.) Most moving is the moment in the title story when a man recalls with despair his mistress dismissing him: “Marie never asked him to leave his family, and he had regarded this too as part of his luck. And then, abruptly, she had ended it. ‘I’m in love with you,’ she’d told him matter-of-factly, ‘and it’s beginning to hurt.’ ”

In this marvelous, masterful collection of such unexamined moments, that minor character is the only one who ever sees it coming.