Isaac and the egg by Bobby Palmer

It’s weird, it’s crazy, it’s hilarious, and it’s incredibly sad. This rollercoaster of a story begins with a man in a drunken stupor, on a bridge, contemplating jumping off. He screams. Then something non-human screams back. He follows the scream and finds a brilliant white egg, about two feet in size, sitting resplendent in a forest clearing. Isaac takes the Egg home.

Thus begins the strangest story you will ever read. The Egg ‘hatches’ and becomes a friendly but annoying and perplexing creature that Isaac somehow has to learn how to live with amidst the chaos that his life has become. Gradually we learn that Isaac’s wife has died tragically only recently, and he is in the depths of despair having lost the one person that gave his life meaning.

This is one of those stories where you are immersed in the world of the narrator, and while you can’t quite trust what you are reading, you just have to go along for the ride. It is a bit like the unreliable narrator of Adrianne Howell’s Hydra. Isaac is similarly unreliable. We know there are things he is not telling us, and we aren’t sure just what the Egg is all about. Many of the situations are laugh-out-loud funny, they play out like a nonsense movie, but gradually the reader comes to realise that actually Isaac is suffering from overwhelmingly depression and grief. The love story at the heart of the novel is sweetly romantic and also very sad.

In this highly original story Palmer manages to explore issues of death, loss and grief, in a way that often has you laughing or reading with a smile on your face. You just have to read it to the end to find out what happens to Isaac and the egg.

Themes: Depression, Grief, Loneliness, Imagination.

Helen Eddy