I put off reading this for a whole year, the way I used to put off eating a bar of chocolate, a pleasure sored up and deferred. I wish I'd read it sooner. I don't think any piece of fiction has hit as close to home as this in a very long time. It's a strange, spare, fable-like tale of an innocent alone in a strange place, a house with many rooms and corridors washed by the sea. His only companion is a mysterious Other who comes and goes, he thinks, from another part of the House, and the remains of thirteen dead people who he cares for and venerates. Then he finds signs of a second living person, and the Other warns him that he is in terrible danger.

It's beautifully written, and wonderfully evocative, but what nearly had me bawling when I reached the end was when I realised how much of a meditation on illness, mental and physical, it actually is, about the loss of Self, the loss of time, the loss of other people, about making peace with that, and being transformed, about the one person who will do anything, go anywhere, to save you, the imopssible enormity of that debt, that love, about the sustaining power of ritual, about how learning to love your own interior landscape helps you survive outside it. I'm nearly bawling again. It's a powerful, profound and deeply affecting piece of work.