A potted biography of Leonid Tsypkin ticks enough ‘cult literature’ boxes for even the most demanding hepcat to be satisfied. A Soviet Jew who survived World War II and a continuing postwar climate of antisemitism, he worked as a medical scientist for 35 years and – for all his effort – never had any work published until shortly before his death, in 1982. Much of Tsypkin’s recognition factor is down to Susan Sontag finding his sole novel in a second-hand bookshop, two decades ago.

The Bridge Over The Neroch was first published in 2013 – this is the first UK edition – and comprises two novellas plus four short stories. The first novella gives the book its title and zigzags through the complex, multi-generational tribulations of a smalltown Russian Jewish family, with a narrator who may not be unreliable as such but is certainly irascible. The second, Norartakir, introduces us to Boris and Tanya, husband and wife holidaying in Armenia from Moscow: their days are marked by stunning landscapes, obliviousness to social convention, barely suppressed neuroses and marital gloom.

Of the short stories, Ten Minutes Of Waiting (in which a man gets into a taxi with a stranger who wastes his time by directing the driver to the wrong place entirely) is a particular delight, and a constant motif of Tsypkin’s prose is his predilection for rangy, conversational sentences, studded with dashes and semicolons, which play a great part in helping the reader feel like they’re truly in the headspace of his beleaguered characters.