He pictures the evening he might have spent, snugly at home, fixing the food he has bought, then lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself slowly sleepy. At first glance, this is an absolutely convincing and charming scene of domestic contentment. Only after a few instances does George notice the omission which makes it meaningless. What is left out of the picture is Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence. 
 Christopher Isherwood's "A Single Man" is a relatable and convincing study of the loss of a beloved person in your life and the aftereffects of dealing with the empty void left behind. We are introduced to our protagonist George, a middle-aged man who has been attached to a man, Jim, who has recently died in an accident. The status of his relationship with Jim is never clearly stated, though it is heavily implied they shared a sexual relationship and were a couple until Jim's untimely death. Exploring the theme of homosexuality, Isherwood never ponders about the usual subjects authors can write about when developing gay or lesbian characters: George's relationship with Jim and the other men in his life is depicted as something entirely normal, which is exactly the way it should be done. 
 George is a college lecturer who tells his students things like "a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary... minorities are people; people, not angels." His homosexuality is never clearly defined; Isherwood refuses to even once use terms such as gay or homosexual, though the overall subject of the novel is clearly implied in the context and the underlying tone of the narrative. 
 I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about. 
 This is a book about clinging to the past, about the importance of forgetting in order to start living again, about how to be truly happy. Philosophical in his novel's depth, yet never exaggeratedly philosophical in his style, Isherwood confronts his readers with a number of important questions about life itself, the importance of past, present and future and how to deal with what lies behind and what lies ahead of you. 
 The writing style requires some time to get used to. When I first started reading the book a short time after watching the movie starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, I was thrown back by the writing. Between the most notable parts of the text, Isherwood likes to ramble on and on about the daily life of our protagonist, and as important as it may be for setting the mood, I personally found it difficult to keep my attention on the prose. However, especially in the second half of the novel, the dominance of those parts is more and more reduced, until we come to the ending, an ending which I am likely not going to forget because it simply was so surprisingly well-written. 
 "A Single Man" is clearly not a novel for everyone, considering that hardly anything is ever happening in this novel and we mostly only get insight on the characters' thoughts and the process of his character development - the latter, by the way, being an aspect which Isherwood understood to embody very believably. It took some time for me to get accustomed to the novel's style and to get the images from the movie out of my head in order to appreciate the book for what it is and to judge it separately from the on-screen adaptation. It's a great book which touches many interesting and important subjects without referring to stereotypical methods to convey them, though in my opinion it's also a book which is hard to recommend to anybody. In "99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939", Anthony Burgess calls this novel "a fine piece of plain writing which haunts the memory", and I couldn't agree more.