The Porpoise
MARK HADDON
(Chatto & Windus, 336 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 01420 592974

Who can forget the sheer inventive energy with which Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time burst upon the world? While the plot of his new, time-slip novel, The Porpoise, is as different as possible from that earlier work, it is stamped with the same bold and original imagination.

A plane crash claims the life of Maja, wife of reclusive millionaire Philippe, leaving only their baby daughter, Angelica. Devastated, Philippe decides to bring his child up in secluded luxury in a house near Winchester called Antioch. This name is the first clue that, despite contemporary detail, such as trips to Legoland, this is no recognisable landscape but a retelling of the myth of Apollonius that Shakespeare plundered for the plot of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.