Barbara Gowdy and Elizabeth Hay Star rating: *****

Howard Jacobson Star rating: *****

Two writers - both Canadian, one gamine, the other angularly handsome - are being asked in public, in Edinburgh, to talk about love.

Barbara Gowdy, the darker one with a pony tail, tells her book festival audience that she is fascinated by love in all its manifestations. Which is why, fearless of contemporary wrath, she refused to make a monster out of the child abductor in her latest novel, Helpless.

It is a difficult subject, when the Madeleine McCann trauma remains raw, and when a convicted paedophile of more than tarnished glitter is suddenly home but searching for somewhere to hide. Yet where some might heckle, this audience is attentive or maybe shocked into stillness, leaving Elizabeth Hay, Gowdy's fellow author on the stage, to observe cryptically that "the word love covers a multitude of sins".

Wreathed in Canada's literary prizes, Gowdy and Hay belong to an exceptional generation of novelists, although neither began writing until their late 30s. Since then, Gowdy has dazzled readers with edgy stories of how love compels us, comforts us and dooms us.

But when asked yesterday if she had "a dream job", other than writing, she replied that she would like to be "a letter-carrier because people are glad to see letter-carriers". A romantic notion when so much, in her books, arrives post haste as bad news for someone.

Hay's highly praised new novel, Late Nights On Air, grew, she said, from her own experience of the Canadian far north, in a wildly atmospheric place called Yellowknife. The story also draws on Hay's early career at the local radio station where, pinned on the notice board were the words: "Do you ever wonder where your voice goes?"

In the passage she read for the audience, Hay's own voice, full of colour and tone, went in every ear, and stayed there.

She, too, is preoccupied with love's rivalries and wayward entanglements, and she remembered someone once saying that when a bad man becomes involved with a good woman, it's like putting an onion next to butter in the fridge: both end up tainted. Not for Gowdy, who replied: "Put both together in a pan, and they're transformed into something better."

On the subject of aberrant behaviour, Howard Jacobson's new novel, The Act Of Love, may be a masterpiece. It's not yet on general release but to a packed and delighted audience, he portrayed it as an exploration of the masochism of love: Felix is happily married to Marisa, but without any spoken coaxing, he intimates that he wants her to take a lover, so that he can feel the ecstasy of jealousy and loss.

Does Marisa comply? Yesterday, Jacobson, who at his funniest still looks like a landslide of gloom, never entirely 'fessed up, but perhaps that's the trick he plays on Felix, leaving him, like that character in Joyce's Exiles, who wants to live in wounding doubt. And the Jewish joke, said Jacobson, was a wonderful example of masochism: "We will beat ourselves better than you can beat us, and our unhappiness will make us happy."

Jacobson, too, is a man of prizes. For Kalooki Nights he won a crate of champagne and a pig, although he told us that didn't actually have to take possession of the pig.

But it did rather put him off bacon, although, as a good Jewish boy, he doesn't actually eat BLTs. Anyway, even masochism stops short of enticing a writer to eat his own prize.