Suppose a Sentence is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay - asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us - and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects -from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard, Anne Carson to Rachel Cusk - to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.

With this brilliant sequel of sorts to his acclaimed Essayism, Brian Dillon confirms he is one of the very best essayists at work today.