'Then, for the forty minutes that were theirs, they spoke of love: as it had been for them, as it still was, of its confinement, necessarily so, its intensity too, its pain, the mockery it had so often felt like, how they had never wasted it by sitting in silence in the dark of a cinema or sleeping through the handful of nights they'd spent together in her flat. They had not wasted it in lovers' quarrels, or lovers' argument. They did not waste it now, in what they said....' Tender, touching, beautifully honest, William Trevor's first collection of stories since the highly acclaimed and award winning The Hill Bachelors (2000), A Bit On The Side explores questions of love and adultery, secret passions, office romances, and the broken and unbroken rules of love.