An excellent opportunity to read a laterally thought-out story – northern English novelist Richard Milward’s fourth, and first for over a decade – with a useful insight to its own effective worldbuilding. Man-Eating Typewritereven pokes fun at itself via drily sarcastic comments in the parentheses and footnotes: in time, you look forward to these cutting remarks, for they illuminate the narrative.

Still more enjoyable is its approach to language. Milward writes in Polari, the secret dialect used in pockets of British gay culture when it was taboo or illegal (Man-Eating Typewriter is set in the late 1960s). With the escapades of one Raymond Novak central to the plot, there’s a lot to take in for the unwitting: I needed to undertake quite a bit of supplementary research in order to help me comprehend its numerous prologues, yet the sheer lunacy that drives the characters into situations maintains interest with eloquence and ease.

Milward’s vivid descriptions of people and setting are truly alien to me as a reader, but A Clockwork Orange’s fictional register Nadsat, and even The BFG’s complex yet delightfully childlike onomatopoeic grasp on language, feel like accessible and relevant reference points. Man-Eating Typewriter comes across, through its layout, as a strange amalgam of fiction and non-fiction, and the focus required to process its level of detail will reward the reader.