Alfred Hayes (1911-85), above, was born in England but grew up in New York. He worked as a journalist, served in Italy during the Second World War and became a scriptwriter in Hollywood. He is not well known but, as Frederic Raphael says in his introduction to this new edition, In Love is “a gem” — brittle, dreamlike, always promising a revelation that never comes.

It opens in Manhattan in the 1940s at the cocktail hour: “‘Here I am,' the man in the hotel bar said to the pretty girl, ‘almost forty, with a small reputation, some money in the bank, a convenient address ... all of me real enough if one doesn't look too closely.'” He begins to tell her the story of a past affair.

This other woman, in her early twenties, already divorced and with a child back at home, lived in a rented apartment with fruit rotting in a black porcelain bowl. He was a man bored, but satisfied with her easy convenience. Then a millionaire offers her $1,000 for one night. She tells this to her lover as a funny story. But she takes it, once, and then again. Suddenly the man is in love, and cruelty and contempt take over.

When the millionaire proposes marriage, the lover resorts to manipulation. “It was all like something in a bad movie, if they still did things like that even in the movies; but mostly it was like something in a bad life.” Eventually she marries her millionaire. And the lover tells his story in Manhattan bars at the cocktail hour.

The epigraph to In Love is taken from George Herbert's poem about religious love: “Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin ...” And the novel ends: “‘There's a poem I always thought I'd someday use ... Do you know it?' He began to quote: ‘Love bade me welcome ...' The pretty girl did not know the poem. They went out together.”

In Love is strange, unsettling, cynical and sad. It is a masterpiece. But if you are in love and want to believe, then don't read it.

In Love by Alfred Hayes
Peter Owen, £9.95

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist