Weather indoors, of all things.

Weather indoors, which I hadn't known I wanted until it was in front of me.

I read this in two sittings in the first week of February with the rain coming in sideways off the estuary, and the odd thing is that a novel set entirely inside a building turned out to be the most weather-attentive book I'd read in years. Tides in the vestibules. Cloud in the upper halls. Birds coming in to nest and going again. He keeps a record of all of it, dated in a calendar of his own devising, and that calendar is one of the better jokes in the book if joke is even the word.

I'm not going to say much about what is happening, because the pleasure of the first sixty pages is enormous and built entirely out of not knowing. I will say that I worked out one of the two large things about four pages before I was meant to and completely failed to see the other coming, and that my daughter, who read it after me, says the opposite happened to her.

What I loved is his manners. He is unfailingly courteous to statues, to birds, and to a dead man he never met, has named himself, and looks after. There is a passage about laying out biscuits for the dead that I think about more often than is reasonable. Clarke gives him a genuinely strange mind and then refuses to make him pitiable. I don't know how she holds that steady across a whole novel, but she does, and I noticed her doing it about four times and could never see the mechanism.

Where it slips, for me, is the last thirty pages or so. Once the explanation arrives it becomes a rather ordinary book about a rather ordinary crime, and there's a stretch of dialogue near the end in which two people tell one another things they both already know, purely for my benefit. I'd have taken the ambiguity. I usually would.

But the ending itself — the last page and a half, out in the world, in snow, with the old man on the bench — I have read out loud to two separate people and both of them went quiet afterwards. It earns what it does without once raising its voice.

Small practical thing. The hardback is a beautiful object and the paperback typeface is cramped and does the journal entries no favours whatsoever. If you're buying it, buy the hardback and don't be talked out of it.

I went back afterwards and read her enormous footnoted one about the magicians, which is an entirely different animal, cold and clever and about four times the length, and I preferred this by some distance. It knows exactly what it is and it stops when it is done.

Nine. Not ten, because of those thirty pages. It's the book I have recommended most this year and the only one I've had a genuine argument about with people who loved it more than I did.