Neither is it particularly a romance – yes, the young love he had with an Elizabethan beauty and what became of that is mainly what drives him, and you get strong senses of unwise stirrings in the modern time, but it's not strictly about love. You get an up-close-and-personal look at the heartbreak a man with an inestimable lifespan can suffer, alongside the ways he tries to counter his losses and his ennui – the drinks and experiences he undergoes, the things he spends time learning, the jobs he does – including being a history teacher in contemporary London, in the book's framing story. It's just a book where the miraculous is accepted as gospel truth. But sinister Machiavellian boss aside, there is nothing of the genre work in particular.Īnd I include in that fantasy, science-fiction – whatever genre you may be thinking this is.

Similarly, the Albatross Society reminded me a little of the X-Men stories, and the way some of those characters deemed their forced isolation and difference to be no different to their superiority to us regular humans. But we only get that in measured, pleasant drips, and that's certainly not the full-on thrust of the narrative. So, as for the centuries he has lived through – here is a hero who could do a Forrest Gump, what with his working alongside Shakespeare, and meeting F Scott Fitzgerald, Chaplin and the like.

This is a strange book, in that if you boil down several elements to their core, they smack of Hollywood cliché and so-on, but nowhere is the bombast of the cinema – what we get is a subtle, general read, that is really quite charming and clever. It might be the only thing he has to live for… But that's not to say it never happened, and that's not to say that he can't feel things for the albatross daughter he's not seen for centuries. Solitude has been tempered since the late Victorian era, when other people even older than him press-ganged him into their society of albatrosses, but the fact of the matter is that falling in love really is a no-no. It means he will live for several more centuries than the ones he has witnessed so far, but ever since his mother was drowned as a witch due to his teenaged self never ageing, he has known the best thing for him – and others – is to regularly move on. In contrast to all us regular humans with our temperamental bodies living out short lifespans, he ages at a speed roughly one-fifteenth of that at which we do, and barely gets touched by any disease. That's not to say he has a freakish wingspan, or anything, but it means he's not a mayfly. Summary: From someone who's quietly become one of the nation's biggest sellers comes another inventive, clever and life-affirming read.

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