What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection went on to become one of the most influential pieces of literary fiction. The titular story is about four people - Mel, Terri, Laura, and Nick. The setting is Mel's house, around a table with a bucket of ice in the middle. A bottle of gin is inside it. They soon start to talk about love. Terri has had an abusive relationship, the abuse, she says, deriving from love. Her abusive boyfriend eventually commits suicide after two attempts (as Terri sees it, another act of love). Soon afterward Mel begins a story about an older couple who survived a car accident because they were wearing seat belts while the DUI teen who caused the crash died.