The second instalment in a trilogy, after Jude in Ireland , this novel sees our orphan hero travel across the sea to find his true love, chip-shop girl Angela, meeting eccentric characters along the way. These often provide mirth as well as topicality, as in Jude's exploration of the banking crisis with a goat trader from Somaliland. Jude's lack of guile means he lands in some very odd situations: teetering on an iceberg in the Irish Sea, cycling down a hadron collider and being harassed into writing a new Ulysses . These all seem like natural effects of the topsy-turvy universe Gough has created. At times the experience is like overhearing a conversation between Sterne, Dickens, Joyce and Charlie Brooker. With its thinly veiled mockery of literary figures, bawdy language, poetic conceit and literary criticism, this is a comic, irreverent whirling dervish of a book, but, as the blind librarian tells Jude, "a novel which is not novel is not a novel". Our hero's next stop is the US. Imagine the possibilities.
