Most of Irish writer Adrian Duncan’s praise has, to date, been domestically sourced: A Sabbatical In Leipzig, his second novel, was published in 2020 and is only now getting a British reprint, with a striking (and relevant) cover featuring the giant steel sculptures of Richard Serra. It’s writing that rewards immersion in its peculiar obsessions, an abundance of detail and patient accretion of vital information about its narrator – a book that ought to have an audience anywhere.

The narrator, Michael, shares some biographical details with Duncan – he hails from Ireland’s rural Midlands, and has a background as a structural engineer, specifically working on bridges. (Knowledge of the author’s bona fides helps to contextualise the passages of technical minutiae: it doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing one could successfully bluff for fictional purposes.) He is, though, a few decades older, retired and widowed, and living in Bilbao, within walking distance of the Guggenheim Museum where those Serra sculptures are held.

We meet Michael one morning in A Sabbatical In Leipzig, alone in his apartment, as he cues up a vinyl version of a favoured Schubert recording. We leave him there too, that very morning, doing much the same. At the mercy of his memories, we journey through the preceding decades and are signposted towards the traumatic occurrences that have shaped his life (including, as per the title, lost years in East Germany) and latter-day mental state. He is perhaps too opaque to engender real sympathy, but thanks to Duncan speaks with a mysterious elegance that’s highly satisfying to read.