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‘I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that people or characters can suddenly undergo deep and genuine change, or that radical change and true epiphanies are common,’ Jamel Brinkley told an interviewer last summer, when his debut short story collection, A LUCKY MAN, was published in the United States ‘But’, he continued, ‘I am completely faithful to the idea that there are moments when we can be profoundly shaken’ In these nine memorable stories Brinkley shakes each of his main characters in turn, and we, as we read, are shaken too   That shaking often has its roots in sex, an act that typically plays out very differently in the minds of Brinkley’s characters than in reality In the opening story, ‘No More Than a Bubble’, two men walk a pair of women home from a house party At the party the men, second-year student gatecrashers surrounded by recent graduates, are convinced they are looking through a window into ‘the next phase of life’, where the booze and weed are more potent, and the women wear ‘better, tinier underwear than the girls we knew’   After a long, strange night, the foursome finally ‘arrive at sex’ (the verb conveys the dogged, low-speed pursuit the men have enacted in order to reach this destination), but not in the way the men wanted The women make them undress first, and insist they regard each other’s nakedness ‘There’s always more to what you want than what you wanted’, one of the women says, but this shared experience doesn’t draw the two friends together; it drives them apart They are too wrapped up in their roles as young black men (‘We both preferred girls of a certain plumpness, with curves – in part, I think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like’) to even consider a thought so radical, for them at least, as enjoying, or even acknowledging in any intimate sense, another male body Yet the sense lingers that their disgust is at least partly alloyed with desire   Throughout the story these men wear a series of masks, and depictions of black masculinity as a performative