FRANK RONAN occupies a curious place in Irish writing. The London-based Wexford man is just 33 and has already published four novels and a collection of short stories. His first novel, The Men Who Loved Evelyn Cotton, won the Irish Times Literature Prize yet he often seems to be cast in a peripheral role when the country's up and coming writers are discussed.

Perhaps it's because Ronan defies pigeonholing. He ploughs an individual and often idiosyncratic furrow, and Lovely, his fifth novel, is another journey into territory left relatively unexplored by his contemporaries. Once more, the merit of the novel is largely due to the unflinching and clinically honest eye which Ronan turns on matters of the heart.

The two protagonists of Love iv are Aaron Gunn, a successful middle-class food writer who enjoys a comfortable and controlled life but yearns to fall madly in love, and Nick Lovely, an unemployed street-wise hustler with a drink problem and an unerring instinct for exploiting other people. Gunn and Lovely are in many ways polar opposites but when they meet at a rave party in Goa they both decide that this is true love. Ronan gleefully shows that in the case of this unfortunate pair, true love will run smooth as sandpaper.

The writer is a considerable stylist and one of his main achievements in this book is the perfect recreation of the milieu in which Lovely moves and into which Gunn is drawn. His characters inhabit the hedonistic Nineties club world where recreational drug use is a given and boredom can only be staved off by the pursuit of the next thrill. Hangovers and drug come-downs have rarely been as acutely and perceptively described. The depressing nature of Nick's drinking eventually assumes harrowing proportions.

There is much about Lovely which could be bleak and one-dimensionally depressing. Ronan spares his characters nothing and the romantic delusions of Aaron are repeatedly smashed to smithereens. But the sheer optimism of the ill-fated couple is depicted with considerable black humour and there are plenty of laughs in Lovely even if they are of the sardonic and uneasy variety.

Lovely is far from perfect. Ronan controls the action superbly for about two thirds of the book but begins to lose his subtlety of touch as he nears the denouement. Points begin to be hammered home and the characters are burdened with dark secrets which seem neither pertinent nor convincing. There is also a weakness for the blokeish sound-bite; one surprised character is described as looking as if "she'd been buggered with an ice lolly".

Quibbling aside, this is another accomplished and individual piece of work from a writer who marries a prolific output with impressive quality control. You ignore Frank Ronan's presence in the front rank of young Irish writers at your peril.

If Aaron Gunn and Nick Lovely are polar opposites, then the same is true of Frank Ronan and Ivy Bannister. Bannister's whimsical world of middle-class domestic disagreement is in sharp contrast to the emotional disaster zone inhabited by Ronan's characters. "The characters in her stories are a good deal nicer but unfortunately they are also much less interesting.

Ivy Bannister's stories are well constructed, often divertingly plotted and written with a great deal of craft. But there does seem to be something missing. This is a world of adultery and disharmony in the suburbs which the author tries to enliven with gothic touches. The inclusion of vengeful magicians' wives, murderous chiropodists and teenage boys who think they are spiders brings the world of Angela Carter to mind but also reminds you how well Carter did this sort of thing and how well it needs to be done if it is not to degenerate into whimsy.

More than half a dozen stories in the book have been broadcast and this may explain the most glaring weakness of the collection. The time constraints of radio could well have a great deal to do with the fact that several potentially interesting stories seem to hurry to an abrupt end when the author has only just deployed the characters.

There are a couple of fine stories in this collection. Seduced is a beguiling tale of an egocentric artist's daily routine as he tramps around Dublin, while My Mother's Daughter is a genuinely moving story which focuses on the difficult relationship between a hen-peeked daughter and a deliberately irascible mother. It's the best story in the collection and shows just what Bannister is capable of when she tackles a serious theme head-on.