I always look at the first line to see if it's an invitation or a warning but copyright pages don't usually do much for me.

The copyright page for this book, however, begins with the following notice: "The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty".

The first line also invites: "I told Helen my story and she went home and cried".

As for the rest of the book, it's a slim volume, consistently understated and thoroughly devastating. The narrator, Sophia Fairclough, has an authorial voice that blends alienation, irony and deadpan description so effectively that it pretty much defies description.

The parts of the book which are asserted to be true are truly horrifying but walk hand in hand with comedy, romance, class tensions and Bohemian living as well as some fantastical elements: a ghost and a pet fox, for example.

While Sophia's life seems to amount to a series of rooms and dull employment, the pace of the story is tremendous, the quotidian on stampede.

Emily Gould, in her introduction to the New York Review Book edition, expresses the sensation perfectly as a "destabilizing inconsistency of tone".

There are characters named Bumble Blunderbore and Peregrine Narrow but by the time you meet them you probably won't do much more than blink in acknowledgment of yet another strangeness.

Sophia herself seems to have been dropped into Depression-era London from another planet and perhaps this is the power of the book, that so much is flattened into strangeness and equivalency. And what about her name? Suggestions of wisdom, of course, but also a fundamental goodness, cut from fair cloth. This checks out.

She reports events very plainly and the effect can be like whiplash. For example, after telling her lover that she's pregnant with her child and, having already had a horrible experience with abortion, is resolved to keep this baby.

Quite a bit is implied but several chapters, the aforementioned true ones, are brutally frank about the conditions of giving birth in a public hospital in the time and place of the story. There are several other tragedies and privations as well as an indescribably sad low point to which Sophia falls, through no fault of her own.

If it's ultimately uplifting, this is because of the brilliance of the creation itself, the wild rush of the prose and the assured steering of its author. I didn't want it to end but once it did—and it's a short novel—I was not only satisfied but also pleasantly exhausted.

It's a very unusual, exhilarating and stimulating book.