A book I really, really liked

I recently visited Megalong Books in Leura (one of my favorite independent bookshops ever), and saw therein a book printed in the old Victorian adventure-novel style, called Pandora in the Congo, by Albert Sánchez Piñol. Being a sucker for Victorian adventure novels, I nabbed it.

It's fantastic. It's not just an adventure novel, but a really fun play on perspective, metafiction, plot twists, the life of a writer, and the nature of popular culture.

It's translated from the original Catalan, but it's a fairly fluid translation, and while there are a few typos, it's not as bad for that as it could be. And it's FUN. And interesting. And clever. And thought-provoking.

You can't get it on Amazon.com, but you can on Amazon.co.uk, and if you're in the Sydney/Blue Mountains area, you can get it from Megalong. You might even be able to persuade your local bookstore to order it in for you (the ISBN is 978 1 84195 815 6).

It made fantastic airport and hotel-room reading during my journey, and I say there's nothing wrong with that.