Greta & Valdin, shortlisted for this year's Ockham Prize for fiction, is a stunningly good comic novel. I hesitate to describe it as it needs to be discovered by the reader, but, as Kate Duignan says on the cover blurb: 'Greta & Valdin is a complete world...it is warm and funny, inventive and charming, with a genuine and earned tenderness at its heart'. That is absolutely right. Mostly set in a vivid Auckland, it's a lively, tender and hilarious look at a very smart, very blended, extended family. Quite incredibly, this is Rebecca K Reilly's first book; I look forward to her next one.