Vac

''This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...''

Paul Ableman''s third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes: ''male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.''

''Paul Ableman''s novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.'' Margaret Drabble