A couple of weeks ago I finished the audiobook of Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox.

I began with exactly no research nor expectations about what the novel would be about. All I knew was it was “funny” but I don’t trust judgements on what is funny. Funny is too individual. And in writing this I’ve found what this book is: individual. Certainly if you’re familiar with the social media of the author, this book has a touch of that public voice, and those locations, pastimes and the like. But this is a novel and it is individual.

And yet, I kept being struck by what this book is like. I want to say it’s like a fictionalised Robert Macfarlane quest, very definitely hyper-local, but more emotional. It recalls, in some ways, the novel Stone Lands by Fiona Robertson, but is nothing like it, as it’s about friendship and companionship, not a husband and wife. Then, there’s more than a touch of the focused mythic and timelessness of the history book Hollow Places, but only slightly foretelling of a future, rather than an analysis of the past, except where it does that too. It’s a bit Douglas Adams only with more anxiety and less space, and a bit Terry Pratchett with less ridiculous social commentary. There are hints of science fiction and fantasy but both are ingrained into the warp and weft of this tale of companions in a world much like the real one, with lives witnessed by friends, written about by others, observed by living creatures.

But forget all that as Everything Will Swallow You is itself. And listening to the marvellous performance of it was like accidentally overhearing a conversation you are not sure is for you, only to fall hard for all the voices. Listening feels like another kind of para-social relationship. You catch yourself huffing quiet laughs with Eric and Carl, who are likely nothing like you in most of the ways characters are dissimilar but also exactly the same as everyone. And oh, how it stings too. I can confirm for myself that indeed this novel is funny, but the laughs, like the pain, arise from circumstances meeting personality. It’s not a book that seems written for gags, unless the joke is the world and all of its local yet universally folkloric tragedies.

TLDR: read or listen to this book. You’ll find it evocative and moving. It reenchants the every day. It’s (quirkily) English, but so conversational you feel included in the world of this novel, rather than excluded because you’re not from round those parts. With this book, you’ll imagine that you could be.