Gold by Dan Rhodes

Literary novels can be a pain, but Dan Rhodes' Gold brings nothing but blissful relief. Miyuki Woodward, born in Osaka but brought up in Wales, is taking a holiday, as she does each January, in a village on the Pembrokeshire coast. She takes clifftop walks during the day and in the evening heads to a pub called The Anchor, where, over the years, she has become confidante to some of the locals, a pub quiz secret weapon to others, and herself a prodigious consumer of the local beer. She also reads a lot, generally the sort of 'short, abnormal' books that Rhodes, writing on his website, claims to favour.

As time passes, Rhodes carefully pays out Miyuki's back-story, along with those of friendly locals like Tall Mr Hughes, Short Mr Hughes and Septic Barry, the caravan park lothario. Characters who were initially strangers become familiar to the reader, by which process of gradual illumination Rhodes creates a remarkably full and convincing universe in a book that is less than two hundred pages long.

With the book's key dramatic event - the disappearance of Tall Mr Hughes - a sense of foreboding arrives. The emphasis of the narrative shifts gently from the comic to the dramatic, before achieving a lovely, ambiguous resolution at the book's end.

Couched in perfect prose, and full of beautifully-pitched character writing (who but Rhodes can weave so seamlessly the hilarious and the pathetic, in its best sense?), Gold is a great and deceptively wise little book. Read it.