AS the title suggests, this short story collection offers a downbeat meditation on love and lost love.

But while each tale becomes more heartbreaking than the last, Junot Diaz's colourful and often crude language elevates it into something lyrical and even funny.

Most of the stories are linked by the same narrator, Yunior, who recounts a different break-up tale in each chapter.

Yunior, an awkward adolescence in Diaz's previous collection Drown (although this book stands alone), has graduated here into full and fallible manhood.

Lusty and prone to affairs - despite how much he loves his current girlfriend - Yunior's infidelity is his eventual downfall.

But he's a man shaped by experience and, as the stories progress, we learn about a difficult childhood and a problematic dynamic between him and his older brother Rafa.

Diaz raises the point that, despite the partners who come and go, sometimes it's our family relationships which truly define us.