The Following Story, by Cees Nooteboorn (Panther, £5.99 in UK)

This gentle, elegantly European novel of ideas and aphorisms draws one into the private musings of Hernann Mussert, trapped as he is in the half life world between thinking and feeling. Believing himself to be a man born out of his time, he is both clever and vulnerable an observer and a romantic. Nooteboom's virtuous elegiac little curiosity offers endless possibilities In part the account of an apathetic decline into inertia, it is also a romance, a confession and a philosophical debate. Testifying to the enduring power of memory and referring throughout to Ovid's Alelamorphoses, Nooteboom's novel demonstrates that highly intellectual fiction may also be humane and moving.