What a wonderful experience reading this novel has been! There’s nothing I enjoy more than taking a risk on a piece of fiction and thinking: Sebastian Faulks isn’t a writer who’s been on my radar before, but this sounds interesting (the power of the publisher’s blurb!) - so I’ll give it a go. Imagine, then, my increasing delight as I delved deeper and deeper into this remarkable firstperson narrative of one Mike Engleby, Cambridge undergraduate, and (in later life) Fleet St journalist. On the face of it, this is a conventional story of a life - early childhood, school and university years, ‘settling down’ into career and relationships - but there are early signs that all is not quite as it seems. In emphases on particular events and the telescoping of particular time periods, particularly the uni years in the early ‘70s - we understand Engleby is exploring how his life and self have been constituted in a non-linear sense. What was it - all that was wretched, comic, wistful and hopeful in his life - that has made him what he is? And who is he exactly? There are panic attacks, sudden fits of anger, odd mental blackouts throughout his life ... how are these to be explained? When a university sweetheart mysteriously disappears, Engleby’s long journey to selfknowledge begins .... To finish, let me quote the aforementioned publisher’s blurb, because I think it is spot-on: ‘Engleby can be read as a lament for a generation and the country it failed. It is also a poignant account of the frailty of human consciousness ... [it] is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has written before: contemporary, demotic, heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black.’ Booker judges take note - if this doesn’t floor you, I have no idea what would. My novel of the year, to date!!

Martin Shaw is from Readings Carlton