This is my first review for GoodReads, and I've made the job harder for myself. Whenever I use review sites for anything, I tend to start out reviewing something that I found simply Staggeringly Good, which tends to create an impression that I'm just easily impressed.

And yet to put it simply, this is the best book I've read in a long time.

The second point of difficulty is that The Gone-Away World is hard to describe in a way which will, a) showcase why you should read it, b) without spoiling things. I found that it does an astonishingly good job of gradually explaining what is going on to the reader, and don't want to ruin things.

It would do well in a double-feature with John Dies at the End by David Wong. The Gone-Away World shares the anarchic energy, but is more ambitious and feels more polished. It's as easy to sell people on as Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, but in the context of GoodReads, however, I can't do anything so simple as presenting erstwhile potential readers with the first few pages and then wait for the laughter to start. So why not I start with the blurb - or at least the blurb of my version:

The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it's on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out - but there's more to the fire, and the Pipe itself, than meets the eye. The job will take Gonzo and his best friend, our narrator, back to their own beginnings and into the dark heart of the Jorgmand Company itself.

From rural childhood in Cricklewood Cove to military service in a bewildering foreign war; from Jarndice University to the sawdust of the Nameless Bar; their story is the story of the Gone-Away World. It is the history of a friendship stretched beyond its limits; a tale of love and loss; of ninjas, pirates, politics; of curious heroism in strange and dangerous places.

The Gone-Away World is an excellent read. It's hilarious, human, heartbreaking and beautiful. It's a book which saddens me because I can't read it again for the first time. That makes no sense at all, but is still absolutely true.

I'd also argue it's a series of different books rolled into one that happen to have the same characters and narrative context, with a very organic development between them as they change focus and theme. The conclusion ties everything together in an eminently satisfying fashion.

Above all else, The Gone-Away World, in all of its ups and downs, feels as though it was a lot of fun to write. It's infectious, and feeds into the reading as well. There's an interesting comparison with The Windup Girl, which I also enjoyed: The Windup Girl is absolutely a good book, but feels less alive and real than The Gone-Away World, despite both displaying imaginative and fantastical settings.

To summarise: this is a book which has been going around people I know as if it were a vastly entertaining and welcomed flu, because it's good enough you can't help but want to pass it along.