Many times during the reading of this book I found myself wishing I had read Inkheart in the more recent past. Its goings on are alluded to many times throughout its fellow story, and my lack of full memory left me frustrated at times. I found that the further I got into Inkspell, the easier this got, but that's my forewarning. Read Inkheart first, and if you've forgotten it, read it again.

Picking up a year after the end of Inkheart, Inkspell deposits us back into the lives of Meggie and Mo, now living with Aunt Elinor, Darius the bumbling reader, and Meggie's no-longer missing mother, Resa.

Resa spent 10 years living in Inkheart, free for a time, but captive for the majority of it, slave to an awful, evil woman. But still Meggie plies her nightly for stories, copying them all down in her own hand onto pages her father binds for her into books. But his enthusiasm soon wanes, as he watches his daughter's continuing obsession with the book he considers nothing but bad luck. Which, given all its done to them, is really putty it rather lightly. But try as she might, for Mo's sake, Meggie can't put the stories away. She can't forget about the Inkworld, as she's come to call it.

When the foreign boy Farid, read out of his story by Mo the previous year, shows up at their door, he essentially seals Meggie's fate. For the plea he's come with is this: Dustfinger (one of Inkheart's leading characters) has finally found someone to read him back to his own world. Farid was meant to go with him, but Orpheus left his words out. He desperately wants their help in getting into the story, to warn Dustfinger of a plot unfolding behind his back. One meant to kill him. And, incidentally, Meggie and her family too.

He's brought with him the words Orpheus used to read Dustfinger home. Meggie takes them with a promise to think it over. And concludes that she'll only do it if she goes too. Also knowing the end Inkheart's writer had in store for Dustfinger, she tells Farid he must leave Gwin, the pet marten, behind.

After rewriting Orpheus' words in her own hand, and adding in the words that should take her along as well, Meggie writes a farewell letter to her family, knowing it will give them no comfort. And within minutes she's gone.

Not long after her miraculous arrival in her favorite story she realizes the full implications of what she's done, and wishes she hadn't. But there's not much to be done for it now.

To make matters worse, Gwin came along with them after all. Meggie explains to Farid why he needed to stay behind, and Farid takes him into the forest and returns without him. But it won't be last of Gwin's part in the story.

The two eventually cross paths with Fenoglio, the writer of Inkheart, and Meggie's only hope of going back home. But the longer the three remain in the story, the more the strange yet familiar world of Inkheart becomes their own. And for all that Fenoglio finds his story out of control and sprouting thoughts of its own, he can't find it in himself to leave it behind. Even when his plans to right the wrongs lead to consequences he'd never intended and could barely live with, he stays. Now just one more soul trapped in a failing story, hoping to turn it to the good.

As a lover of words, it's entirely intriguing to see a world where words are all-powerful. Indeed, their author at times has his own doubts, feels that he couldn't, after all, have created all this, it must have always been. And yet he can alter the story, for better or worse, with new words. Life and death, even, he can deal out. And before the story closes, Elinor sits in her library wondering, what happens to a book that goes into its own story, as Orpheus has taken Inkheart into itself.

What happens indeed?

Chill was born with a bum leg, but that never stopped him from doing anything. In the fifth grade, a new boy came to school and tried to get everyones' respect by picking on Chill and his leg. That didn't go over so well, and Chill just came out looking as cool as ever, while the new kid got what he asked for.

Now, It's sophomore year, and Chill and his best friend Shane get a new english teacher who Chill hates. The new teacher, Mr. Sfinkter, doesn't like Chill very much either. But Shane idolises Mr. Sfinkter, as he's published three books, and Shane dreams to become a writer as well. Sadly, Chill is right; Mr. Sfinkter is manipulative, demeaning, and a downright bully. How will Chill show Shane and everyone else the man that Mr. Sfinkter really is? You can't even begin to imagine.

Even though this book is very short, it's surprisingly intense. When I picked it up, I didn't know what to expect. I just knew that the book looked cool, and like it'd be a good read. It defiantely was, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I can't wait to read the rest of the Orca Soundings Series.

According to Freud it is possible to be wrecked by success. Of course it is also possible to be wrecked by failure, and Adam Kellas, the main protagonist of Now We Are Beginning Our Descent is wrecked by both simultaneously.

Adam Kellas, like James Meek himself, is a British war journalist who finds himself covering the war in Afghanistan. While stationed there he starts a deliberately provocative and commercial thriller and also encounters another journalist - an American called Astrid - with whom he rapidly becomes fascinated ('A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn't enough to contain the presence of someone else inside him'). For instance he finds himself thinking about the sound she makes, the 'exhalation with voice which came from her involuntarily' as she takes the load of her rucksack on her back.

A year later, back in the UK, he has finished his thriller and has just received the offer of a six-figure sum from a publisher, and yet he is unhappy. The book, after all, is a cynical reaction to the market place after his previous novels, a little like James Meek's works before The People's Act of Love, haven't sold at all. He has written it to make money and to be read, and it compares unfavourably with the masterpiece of his friend which is being lauded everywhere. He quits his job as a journalist and boards a plane and travels first class to New York and during this journey he tells his story, in flashback, to the woman sitting next to him. Gradually various layers of his life are exposed: explosive, dangerous incidents in both Afghanistan and Britain that have caused him to begin his descent. There are two main pivotal moments: an incident in Afghanistan which makes him question his role as disinterested observer (accidentally he becomes involves and feels guilty) and a dinner-party which is jaw-dropping in its vindictiveness. Both of these are causing him to run away, and yet he is also running towards something too.

But this running away is also a sort of slithering downwards - how much so becomes apparent in one of the major twists in the novel when he reaches New York - and once he starts slithering he can't seem to stop. He runs blindly onwards towards what he thinks he wants but having found it discovers it is not what he wanted at all. It sounds desperate, and in some ways it is, but there is a touch of satisfaction which is not just schadenfreude, because it is only by descending that Adam Kellas can learn that no one ever gets exactly what they want. He has to compromise, and his new acquisition turns out to be more valuable because of that.

This is a hugely satisfying novel, cleverly-constructed, one of the best I have read for some time; the characters, dialogue and settings are fascinating and the story gripping. There are so many beautifully-written passages that I have difficulty picking out just one, but I think it is when Meek describes characters that I admire him the most:

He dressed as if he believed he was a younger, fitter man, in a tight black sweater that clung to his sagging torso. He wore Ray-Bans and had eczema. He was always moving, making jerky little movements of his head, shifting from foot to foot, swinging his body from side to side, like a bird waiting for grain to fall.

It is also a book that incidentally tells a lot about the process of writing - or at least how James Meek writes. It is in part a plea for the purity of the creative process and the idea that a writer should above all write for his or herself as the passenger next to Adam Kellas says 'I like to think there are people out there writing books that I can only read by working hard at it even if I never do read them. I like to think there are writers left who don't give a fuck, you know? "Here's my book. You don't like it, you can go fuck yourself , I don't care."'

Until recently I had the same literary agent as James Meek but although she sold James Meek's last work very successfully - it was a multi-national bestseller - she couldn't sell mine at all and consequently I was dropped. It has been hard finding the motivation to continue but when I read that passage I felt that I should. The business of writing demands obstinacy and perseverance as well as talent and clearly James Meek has much of all three.

I have not yet read any of James Meeks's other works but now feel that I must, very soon, in fact I should think that I'd want to read every word that he writes.