LONELINESS IS A KILLER, so people have said... and Martha is lonely, even though a neurological quirk makes her see familiar faces everywhere. To the extent that she has to hold down tricky conversations with jostling, self-important dollar bills, go lip-to-lip with a Hollywood icon, and ride a warhorse with a stiff and spectacular General, all within the same square mile.

Neil Baker doesn't even have quirks to break through his monotonous existence but don't let us the readers be guilty of overlooking him too. Though exhaustion makes his soul invisible.

Martha and Neil don't meet. But they have a common denominator in Aaron, a quiet, sensitive and ardently faithful boy, who doesn't fit in either - despite his loving family and his prayers - and who feels the full force of the dramas that encircle him.

In this, the very first novel he committed to paper, and now being published for the first time, Jon Ferguson paints a transatlantic, era-crossing world of pain and humour that has a lot in common with classics such as Under Milkwood and Ulysses while retaining his modern American voice. Imagine Holden Caulfield writing To the Lighthouse.A stretch too far? Open this book and let it take you there.