Marius Brill's first novel is a completely wacky mix - something of Tom Sharpe, Jasper Fforde, Will Self, the best and worst of an unedited student magazine and a lot of Marius Brill. In brief, this is a comic thriller told by a distressed, stolen library book that has fallen in love with its reader - a young woman called Miranda who finds herself having a romantic adventure with a spy, who realises he may just have to kill her. However the plot is secondary to the endless mixture of set pieces, bad jokes, comic episodes and philosophical nuggets interspersed by some wonderful descriptive passages. At times exhilarating, frequently appalling or worse, most readers will only persevere with such a wildly uneven book if the evidence of talent is overwhelming. And here it is. The author has already made his name as a scriptwriter and is clearly too clever by half, with an overgrown schoolboy's sense of the grotesque which can make the reader feel rather queasy, but is a huge talent we are likely to hear a lot more of in the future.