Whoever put 1956 on this needs a word with themselves.

Right, first thing: the date on this listing is wrong and the second name on it belongs to the fella that drew the comic version, so somebody's got their wires crossed somewhere. No the book's fault. Annoyed me anyway.

The book, then. I'd never read it and I'd been hearing about it for thirty year. Shorter than I expected and a lot stranger. A man comes unstuck in time, so it jumps about — Dresden, the war, a zoo on another planet, his daughter giving him a row about a pair of wee blue slippers — and none of it's in order and it doesnae matter a bit.

So it goes, every time somebody dies, over and over, till it stops being a phrase and starts being a hard thing to sit through.

What got me was what's not in it. There's no big speech about how terrible it all was. He tells you about the corpse mines and then moves straight on to something daft about a dog. My da was in the merchant navy and never said one word about any of it, and nothing I've read gets nearer to how that silence sounded from the outside.

Eight. Took me two goes to get into it. Worth the second go.