A red winged monster with a broken heart and a camera. I have never read anything like it and I am still a bit dizzy.

I didn't know you were allowed to do this!

It is a novel in verse about Geryon, who in the old Greek story is a red monster killed by Herakles as one of his labours, except that here Geryon is a small boy with red wings who is bullied by his brother, takes photographs, and falls hopelessly in love with Herakles, who is a teenage boy with a motorbike and a careless streak.

The lines break in places you do not expect and every one of them earns it. There are images in here that went into me like a hook and are still in. Geryon's wings pressed flat under his coat. The volcano. His mother at the kitchen table with the smoke going up from her cigarette. That last photograph of the three of them standing near the bakery oven, immortal.

It is Grief and Adolescence and Myth all wearing the same coat, and it never once stops to explain itself, which is why I have taken a mark off; I got thoroughly lost in the essay at the front about Stesichoros and had to be talked through it by a very patient woman in a bookshop in York.

Nine. Read it slowly. It is only a couple of hours.