In the open-plan office where he takes care of IT, a fifty-something man is experiencing the first signs of the andropause — that erosion of male desire — and trying to distract himself as best he can. He indulges in erotic reveries fuelled by his internet research into a certain bass player who inspires fantasies in him.

Two years later, the fantasy becomes more tangible when he meets a living, breathing musician. The headiness of the encounter, shortly followed by the inexplicable break-up and the hell of unrequited love, plunges the narrator into an intense examination of his situation in life. What is the stuff of contemporary fantasies? How compatible are they with a body that is advancing in age? And how to get back on one’s feet after one has been hurt in love?

In this self-deprecating story that takes aim at psychoanalytic dogma and the conventions of courtship, the author reshuffles the emotional deck and shows us that the novel of love needs reinventing.