Agustin Fernandez Mallo (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

This is a wonderful, mesmeric book. It is a book of ideas – how they arise, who has them, where they lead to, how all our lives are interconnected by them. Effortlessly blending art and science, hypothesis and fact, loneliness and love in a series of short, self-contained chapters that range in length from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages, Fernandez Mallo intertwines the stories of his disparate protagonists through a series of elliptical, oblique and poetic vignettes. As they explore the relationships between each other, between solitude and creativity, between knowledge and invention, we are taken around the globe and out to the edge of the knowable universe. Some narrative strands connect with each other; some do not, remaining separate from the whole by apparently random arrangement. We are asked to consider the opinions of Einstein and Bjork, the limits of paternal love, megalomania on the Russian Steppe and much much more: ideas and questions float across these pages like confetti. But the true pleasure is in the writing: the language is dense but effortlessly light, without a wasted word, with an immaculate clarity of expression, always elegant and rhythmic. This is a triumph of translation too: Thomas Bunstead has produced a book that reads as though written in English in the first place, with a natural love of dialogue and idiom. And perhaps best of all, it is the second book in a trilogy, not obviously dependent on what precedes it, not obviously leading to a sequel, simply part of a luminous and sublime whole.

Price: £12.99. Info: www.fitzcarraldoeditions.com

words MAT DAVIES