The Rabbit Back Literature Society - Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

This Finnish novel about a mysterious group of authors and the society that shaped them was a "wild-card" present and I'm extremely glad to have received it - it is both brilliantly insane, and insanely brilliant. As the story develops, we are presented with an increasingly disturbing set of answers to the perennial question of where writers get their ideas from, as well as being reminded that nothing is ever as it seems. Although this book contains several elements that I would usually find irritating - a blurred line between fantasy and reality, and overt reminders that we are reading a work of fiction - I was drawn in by the viewpoint of the central character, who is both likeable and strongly grounded in reality, and totally won over by the originality of the ideas explored.