John Darnielle is the singer and songwriter of The Mountain Goats, one of my favourite bands. When I heard that he'd written a novel, and that it was good, and to be published in the UK by Granta (rights in Australasia have gone to Scribe) it's fair to say I was excited! It really is a pretty extraordinary, inventive and powerful novel, and for a first novel it's amazing. It's told backwards. Each chapter takes place earlier than the one before, getting ever closer to the event at the core of the book, which you already know about even before you start reading - the narrator is hideously disfigured, which he refers to as 'the accident', but which he seems to have done to himself. He works writing a choose-your-own-adventure style fantasy game in which players write to him, he prepares their next choice of moves, to which they in turn respond. Extracts from the game are scattered throughout the book, because a player has died by actually enacting his moves, rather than fantasizing them. This is a novel about loneliness, imaginary worlds and despair, but told with empathy, delicacy and superb control. A memorable book indeed.