And ineffectual prose emerges as the self-defining mediatrix between reality and the inexplicable mysteries of bare existence.

We see them every day and I wanted to reflect that, and I didn’t want to privilege the reader over the characters and give the reader any more information than the character had. In That colour a woman observes the autumn colours of the trees and points them out to her partner as he does the washing up “I dried my hands and went through to the front room and stood beside her.

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. This style is different in the fact that introductory expressions such as, ‘she thought’, and ‘they said’, are not used. But it is actually much more a novel about life; the presence of death in the story is counterpointed by the narration of one of the main characters, a young woman who reveals that she is pregnant. As the story moves on however we learn he is building both a tree house and a raft in preparation for some kind of flood: “But when it starts they won’t understand.

To play with time as he does - events don’t occur in a linear way - and to refuse to give most of the characters names, are very bold steps for a young novelist. The notable exception, besides inclusion in a round-up in the Observer, has been a rave from Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times, who hailed it as "a dream of a novel" and an "assured debut". He gave us a picture of his approach: “The starting point for the book was a community who don’t see themselves as a community, living in the same street, living interwoven lives - and yet they don’t know each other, or each other’s names. But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter and a slow walk home.The author takes this sad but simple fact of the death of a down and out and sets about trying to reconstruct the events that might have led up to the death. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowah doowah doowah. His aim was 'to take a day in the life of one street in a city, and try to show the vast multiplicity of stories which were happening there, and to look at how those stories interacted with each other in an environment where people were constantly moving in and out and rarely knew each other’s names'.