Have you ever read a book that you can feel is soaring way over your head, but you’ve loved it anyway? I just had one of those moments reading Vellum by Hal Duncan from The Book of All Hours series.

Fragmented, erratic and brilliant, it flips forward and shuffles back through time to narrate the gathering of the unkin, angels and demons, as they fight for the rule of the Vellum, an infinite universe of which the world we know is a tiny fragment. Twisting through time and across multiverses, characters’ lives are revealed to have extended beyond the borders of a typical human span, linked to archetypes dating back to classical myth and ancient Sumer.

It’s incredibly clever, like a cyberpunk epic sprung from the dust of ancient myths (though apparently the correct generic categorisation for that is New Weird, you learn something new every day…) and while you do need to pay attention to fully keep a grip on the novel’s ambitious scope, it’s certainly worth it. I just need to dig out a copy of the follow-up, Ink.