The moment I heard about Jeremy Gavron’s new novel, I knew I had to read it. Felix Culpa starts with the death of a young man, a prison inmate, before going back to explore his life and how much the people around him actually knew him. As the narrator looks deeper into Felix’s story, he begins to feel like he’s losing himself to it.

But the most interesting thing about this book is, without a doubt, the construction: a collage of a novel, most of Felix Culpa is composed of sentences lifted word-for-word from literary luminaries such as Cormac McCarthy, Mary Shelley, and Vladimir Nabokov, etc. This is a technique used in all kinds of different art forms, but I’d never seen it in literature before. I was curious to know how Gavron could tell a story – his own story, at that – using words taken straight from the mouths of other authors, let alone how he could use them to form a coherent flow of ideas.

For the first few pages, I found myself switching back and forth between seeing it as one continuous novel, and seeing it as an amalgamation of distinct voices that have been carefully chosen because of the way they reference each other. It was like I was reading two very different books at once. As the narrator loses his sense of identity, however, the construction of the narrative creates an interesting symmetry with the storyline. The way the disparate voices reflect the narrator’s question of identity is just as poetic as the language itself, and creates an immersive representation of the narrator’s experience.

This is one for those avid readers who like a challenge, and who can’t get enough of the literary giants of modern history, only this time in a new, repurposed format.

Tom Davies works as a bookseller at Readings Doncaster.