Sometimes I read a novel and can't help suspecting that it was born in some kind of drunken parlour game where friends write down random ideas on a piece of paper and the author is challenged to write a novel tying together all the plot elements she draws out of a hat. "Robert Louis Stevenson, Tristan & Isolde, Capri, adoption, Great Exhibition, Charles Darwin, Death in Venice, car-wash, ...," it must have gone on this occasion.

Whether or not that's what really happened, the result is an ingenious pastiche of the postmodern-Victorian-novel genre (think French lieutenant's woman or Possession), opening with the memorably Chaplinesque image of the narrator and her mother living in a house built on such a steep slope that they weren't allowed spaghetti or peas. It's great fun and runs at a lightning pace, we get bombarded with casual references to Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll, and much else, and there's a semi-serious underlying idea about the importance of stories in helping us to make sense of an impossibly dynamic universe. ( )

Érase una vez un farero ciego y una niña huérfana... Así podría empezar uno de los muchos cuentos del señor Pew, el hombre encargado de cuidar del faro de un remoto pueblo de Escocia. Quien le escucha es la pequeña Silver, una chiquilla lista que acaba de perder a su madre y de ganar a un nuevo amigo, un hombre enamorado de las palabras y dispuesto a contar historias insólitas, que se enlazan unas con otras en una trenza sin fin. Sentada al lado del señor Pew, Silver llegará a saber cómo y cuándo se construyó el faro, y descubrirá a personas tan fascinantes como Stevenson, Darwin y el reverendo Babel, un libertino lleno de ira y de amor por una hermosa mujer. Cuando Silver crezca, los cuentos del señor Pew la acompañarán y harán de ella una lectora voraz, fascinada por los libros y por los cuerpos misteriosos que va encontrando en su camino.

Unparalleled. The only author I can compare to Jeanette Winterson is Jeanette Winterson. She meets Borges and Garcia Marquez and Rhys and Kingsolver at a nexus of magic and pathos, and she bests them all. ( )

An off-beat, weird, lovely book that made me think of The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip and the Series of Unfortunate Events books early on, oddly enough, but that turned toward a more adult mood deeper into the book. It's almost like a long prose poem, maybe. ( )

Although beautifully written, the story is hard to follow. ( )