The Blue, by Maggie Gee / Mortality, by Nicholas Royle

Una doesn't complain about the loss of her husband. She tries not to make a fuss, and never cries. Until the day when her Indian neighbour abruptly cuts down her tree, she is quietly, Englishly stoic. "After all," she says, "the British had lost an empire."

Una is typical in The Blue, Maggie Gee's collection of understated short stories. She represents a particular kind of modern Britishness: liberal, decent and fundamentally kind, but struggling to keep up. "Two of the twins' friends were Muslim - or was it Hindu?" thinks Cecily, seeing an angry young man in her supermarket aisle and giving him "a liberal, accepting smile". Wherever Gee's characters travel - as far from home as Ramsgate or Kampala - they take this peculiarly English trait with them. They are Brits abroad, many in their own homes. And no matter how lost or frightened they are, they can't seem to help being "accepting".

Mortality is very different. Gee's characters are prey to one British curse, crushed by the knowledge of the littleness of life, but Nicholas Royle is fond of the big gesture. Cars crash, planes fall out of the sky and Vesuvius erupts more than once.

These are young men who live and dream the streets of Amsterdam, Naples and New York as if they own them, despite a constant, hidden danger, like "a young man standing in a doorway whom in the darkness I had failed to see". They drive too fast and take too many drugs. Everybody is sleeping with someone they shouldn't be; nobody does it with anyone they should.

Of course, the books are both about Mortality, going into The Blue. It's just that Royle handles it like a bloke and Gee, delicately, euphemistically, like a lady.

His morgue technician drops organs on the floor. Her laundress slips away into the sea, her skin covered in butterflies. His hypochondriac finds himself "fishing out a slimy fistful" of his own faeces, "delving into it with my ungloved fingers, astonished at how hot it was". Her elderly husband, in the story "Starting at Last", is found "at the end of a short ribbon of sunlight, her favourite flowers held out towards her." Her characters are unlikely ever to acknowledge their scatological functions.

Both collections are also about love. In Gee's "Good People", a cynical journalist grasps the hand of a greaseball TV evangelist as their plane starts to plummet. She tells him that an act of kindness has "saved" her. He tells her she's wrong. In Royle's "The Madwoman", an ex-girlfriend suddenly falls through a man's ceiling. This is sci-fi hyper-realism happening to young, sexual, single men. The dialogue could stand to be a bit more sensitive (does anyone really say "Soz", or "big cheese"?). But some of his imagery is just beautiful.

One of Royle's most tender stories is "Buxton, Texas", in which a man falls in love. "He drove her back south of the river, headlights splashing off the white tunnel like someone diving in at the deep end." Later, "the encroaching night chased the little car out of the track and sealed it up after them." It is the one of the most joyous, but also the saddest, stories in this collection. It makes you wish that the author didn't have such a downer on his creations.

A similar fate is shared by Joe, in Gee's series of three stories about him. After years of the regular heartbreak of humdrum married life, one day Joe finds something totally "undisappointing". It brings a tear, but it may be the most heartwarming of Gee's stories. If only because of the triumphant unBritishness of that word.