Ashes to Ashes, by Harold Pinter (Faber, £6.99 in UK)

A couple sit in a gradually darkening room engaged in laconic, if tensely charged, conversation. At first it seems as if they are intending lovers engaged in sophisticatedly detached verbal foreplay, the central theme of which is her previous relationship; or is she in fact haunted by a loss far greater than the past sexual humiliation in which she appears to have been complicit? Could her story be tragic? Pinter, the master of the sinister unspoken nuance, is at his sharpest here in a two hander capable, with the right pairing, of making one's skin crawl. Ambiguous to the final line, this nasty, touching dialogue which was first performed last September confirms Pinter's ear is as sharp as ever - even when read on the page.