"The problem was that at the back of Roy's world-view lay the Rolling Stones...It had never, finally, been Roy's way, though he'd played at it. But Jimmy had lived it to the end, for both of them."

But chez Jimmy just about the only thing left is "a yellowing photograph of Keith Richards pinned to the wall."

Last summer Kureishi left the mother of his two young sons. He visits now in what he calls the manner of a kindly uncle. Although this collection of ten tart-edged pieces was accumulated over a period of time, it's hard not to find echoes of the artist's private life throughout: failed communication; children born of desperation; the constant drawing of messy conclusions. 'From Nightlight':

"All his life, it seems, he's been seeking sex. He isn't certain why, but he must have gathered it was an important thing to want. And now he has it, it doesn't seem sufficient."

This could read like self-pitying mid-life confessional had not Kureishi described himself recently as basically "a happy bloke."

He likes to call his stories snapshots of critical moments in the lives of their characters - like Daniel Blaufuks' murky, spare, evocative cover images. They allow Kureishi to exercise a darker, more concentrated imagination than he evidences in either of his marvellous full-length novels. This telegraphing makes these pieces seem sometimes almost unduly bitter; they avoid accusations of misogyny precisely because almost every man we meet is really a child. Consider the character (in the smartly titled 'D'accord Baby') who "did a little underlining, which since school he had considered a sign of seriousness."

'We're Not Jews' and 'My Son The Fanatic' are the most instantly recognisable. These, and to an extent the long and playful 'With Your Tongue Down My Throat', address issues first glimpsed in My Beautiful Launderette and The Buddha of Suburbia: the bigotry of a fin-de-siecle Britain; the clear-headed cutting through preconception that Kureishi's Asian-English background affords. As evidenced by 1995 novel The Black Album, the author is never really torn between reverence towards Asian culture and his middle-class Europeanism. There he respectfully details the furore surrounding his friend Salman Rushdie, and, although he finds some sympathy for the offended, his liberal sensibilities ultimately carry the day. Much the same is true here.

The only story that outright fails is Lately. Several of these have an almost freewheeling, tentative, on-the-hoof self-evolution. When it works - 'In A Blue Time', 'With Your Tongue' - it works brilliantly, like sweet, compactly realised novellas. Lately owes more to the author's only feature film, 1991's strained, shapeless London Kills Me. We understand the telling, but the story - and especially characters - remain exclusive of its audience.

It is perhaps fitting that the book's most unexpected should bring up the rear. Although of a piece with the essential themes elsewhere, 'The Flies'' central metaphor - of swarms that hatch to signal the end of a relationship - echoes initially Ballard and Carroll (just as the mercifully short 'The Tale of The Turd' makes us think of Burroughs). The rich, he considers, are no less afflicted, just more able to afford the repair bill. In the end it's most reminiscent - appropriately - of Will Self's 'The End of The Relationship', from his Grey Area collection.

Whatever he does, Kureishi has an immediately recognisable, literary but very approachable style. Lucid, cohesive, Love In A Blue Time reads less like disparate tales than a rambling, loosely-structured novel, with plenty worth underlining. That is its triumph.