Songs of Silence is one of those stories which reminds me of something from my childhood. In the Sixties, my mother took a weekly journal called The Woman, (my father, on whom be peace, never tired of joking about how many "old women" there were in his bedroom). The Woman often featured quite long stories similar to this, in serialized form.

You were always left hanging at a moment of high drama. There was that annoying little line of dots, and the slogan.......to be continued.

Actually, Songs of Silence is beautifully written, and set in the hills of North Wales, which are described with skill and a love for the landscape and sheep farming.

The protagonist is a doctor, Owen, who is cracking up.... divorce and the loss of his children, who are now in Australia, has left him vulnerable and ship-wrecked. He is taken to Wales by another couple, to hide out in their cottage and recuperate.

Meanwhile, another parallel narrative is unfolding in a similar place but some years further back. (The clue to this is that one character is living in Britain before the decimalization of the currency, and the other in more recent times). Rhodri is a handsome young hill farmer living like a hermit in a cottage on the mountain, with only his dogs for company.

Curiously, in both narratives, there is a person who is mute. In Rhodri's village it is Malen, a woman-child with hair the colour of fire, and copper and poppies, and skin white as snowdrops and cotton-wool clouds. In the village that Owen inhabits, there is an old, old man, Gethin Morgan, who can not speak, but screams instead. Naturally, some people find this unsettling.

Owen has the good fortune to meet Miss Right, a primary school teacher called Gwenhwyfar Jones, a lady with "a soft, deep voice which matched her soft, deep breasts", terrific legs, and endless compassion. Together they explore the mystery of who Owen really is.... he was adopted in infancy, and now Gwen tells him he bears an uncanny resemblance to a local author.

There is a lot of discussion about what a mute person feels, and how they handle the inability to speak.... and yet in both the cases mentioned, the mute is able to communicate volumes with gestures, eyes and other body language. There is a kind of empathy for both these people, almost like an appeal for the world to be more tolerant of folks afflicted in this way.

It is a complicated little story, but one I found easy to read and rather satisfying. Little Gwen is extremely likeable, while Owen is a bit self absorbed. I keep wanting to tell him to grow up and snap out of it. I guess I would never make a counsellor.

Anyway, it is a refreshing and clever story and contains snippets of wisdom.

I dare you to read the first two pages and not want to finish the rest of the book.

Part Victorian murder mystery, part fantastical alternate history with a liberal dash of lexigraphical acrobatics, The Somnambulist combines a labyrinthine plot with haunting characters and an unreliable narrator which coalesces into an unexpected crescendo no one could anticipate.

The Somnambulist is a bald, mute giant of man who when pierced with swords does not bleed. His almost constant companion is Edward Moon, often referred to as the conjurer, with whom he conducts a magical act and solves the most mysterious of mysteries. When drawn into the enigmatic and horrifying deaths of two lechers, seemingly unconnected except for the implausible nature of their deaths, these crimes, however, and their monstrous solution are just the first strands in unraveling the gordian knot that is threatening the city of London.

At times like taking a midnight stroll through densely fogged streets and hearing ominous footsteps behind you, or standing slack-jawed at a bawdy freak show, or laughing raucously at a local pub Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist is reminiscent of authors of such note as Mary Shelley, Neil Gaiman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and Michael Chabon.

This books is essential for all you Word Nerds out there as I learned 9 new words during the course of the book! [coruscating, sybaritism, postprandial, risible, penury, cognoscenti, minatory, ratiocination, eldritch] Their inclusion is not abrupt as in a Mad Lib, but fit seamlessly into the otherworldly elegance of the prose.

A solid 4 and a half, with its only caveat being that the end leaves you thinking "What the Deuce?!"