This was my fourth reading of this brilliantly perfect novel. I am deeply moved each time I reach this book; I cannot imagine how it would have affected me had I read it in 1964 when it was first published. This novel covers one day in the life of George, an English professor at a nondiscript college in California. The time is just before the Christmas season, that time in America dreaded aged gay men look better than their straight counterparts: "What's wrong with them [straight men] is their fatalistic acceptance of middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending retirement and golf. George is different from them because. . . he hasn't given up." Finally, Isherwood describes poignantly the unawareness of friends: "How many times, when Jim and I had been quarreling and came to visit you--sullking, avoiding each other's eyes, talking to each other only through you [haven't we all been in that awkward position]-- did you somehow bring us together again by the sheer power of your unawareness that anything was wrong?" There are countless gems like these through out this wonderful book.

A perfect novel about loss and loneliness, A SINGLE MAN constantly gets named near the top of "best gay" lists of books as well as one of the great novels of the 20th Century, both distinctions it richly deserves.

- George, Kenny, Charlotte -- come to exist in your mind almost as vividly as people in your own life. The book is partly modelled on "Ulysses," and so will be of extraordinary interest to students of Joyce, but I hasten to add that the novel is brief and easy-to-read. Indeed, I have read "A Single Man" countless times and will read it countless times more. Isherwood will always be best known for his "Berlin Stories" (and that largely because the musical and movie "Cabaret" was based on one of them), but this unforgettable short novel is his masterpiece.