LANNY

Max Porter (Faber & Faber)

Anyone who’s read Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers from 2015 will not forget it in a hurry. It’s one of the most haunting books in recent memory, brilliantly examining loss in startling scraps of poetic prose. Porter’s much-awaited follow-up, Lanny, is a more densely-populated work, but equally striking. The first half of the book grounds us in the life of the unusual Lanny through the voices of our eponymous hero, his parents, his creative mentor Mad Pete and the omniscient Dead Papa Toothwort – a shape-shifting spectre who stalks Lanny’s village.  It’s a very good setup, allowing Porter’s imagination to soar during the second act. Just as we’d settled into its rhythms, Lanny goes missing, and what was left of convention goes out the window as the novel bursts into a riotous ‘play for voices’. Porter is one of the most exciting writers around, and this book is a sort of magic.

words Joshua Rees

Price: £12.99. Info: www.faber.co.uk