Jabberwock

Imagine if Flann O'Brien, with a little help from James Joyce, had rewritten Alice in Wonderland or Laurence Sterne had sent Don Quixote on a voyage alongside Lemuel Gulliver, then you have entered the world of Jabberwock - an anarchic novel full of delights and fromulous pleasures.

It tells the story of Ignatius Hackett, once the toast of 1920s literary 'Dubilin' before he is undone by words and dispatched to Swift's Mental Asylum. With Europe on the brink of war, his journalistic skills are remembered and he is sent across the water to investigate a spate of verbal outrages in a topsy-turvy world in which fonts and footnotes flourish while puns and paradoxes proliferate at an alarming rate. Spurred on, he travels to France and into the dark heart of Germany, and gets caught up in a sinister chess-game of police and informers, of spies and revolutionaries behind which moves the shadowy Ouroboros Brotherhood. Who can be trusted, when words themselves are no longer content to be bound in dictionaries, but are in danger of being pressganged as wonder-weapons in the new World War?