The Whispering Muse

Suppose, just for a moment, that not all of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason to find the Golden Fleece were actually dead. Suppose that one of them, transformed into a seagull, prizes off a splinter of the Argo's bow-timber; and suppose that in 1949, transformed again into the strapping second mate of a Danish cargo-ship, he entertains the crew over dinner by listening to his splinter and relaying the stories it tells him of the Argo's fantastic voyage: islands of women, strange threats, bardic reveries, myths within myths. Suppose, too, that all this is related by the most unreliable of narrators - a crazy old man who seems to have been on very much the wrong side of the recent world war - and you might be beginning to appreciate the sheer, delightful weirdness of The Whispering Muse.

Author, songwriter, poet, all-round Renaissance man and Clown Prince of Iceland, Sjón

has been attracting attention in the English-speaking world since his lyrics for Lars Von Trier's twisted musical Dancing in the Dark gained him - and his frequent collaborator, Bjork - an Academy Award nomination. The Whispering Muse is his third novel to be published by the pioneering Telegram imprint, and it's a work of outrageous and astounding strangeness: fusing horror with slapstick, magical realism with absurdist deadpan wit, and modernist high-jinks with the resonance of ancient myth.