Seizure, By Erica Wagner

It has been said that those who narrate marvels must not themselves be too marvellous. By these lights, Janet, the heroine of Erica Wagner's novel, is an ideal narrator. Emphatically unromantic (she lulls herself to sleep with funding reports), she is nonetheless the victim of curious fits full of dreams and death.

When she finds herself, unexpectedly, the owner of a cottage left her by her mother, these intimations increase in volume and ubiquity. She meets near the cottage a stranger who also has a key to it. Now, what would any red-blooded person do, once confronted by a stalker who thinks he has title to your past? Why, bonk them senseless of course – which Janet does. It's a shame that he turns out to be her half-brother.

It's an easy incident to mock but this novel, though extravagantly written, deserves no mockery. It feels sometimes like a short story that has slipped its moorings, but the characters are finely wrought and the presence throughout of Celtic and Nordic myth buoys up this strange tale of spiritual homecoming.

Faber £7.99