The Horned Man James Lasdun Jonathan Cape, 195pp, £10.99 ISBN 0224062174

James Lasdun's first novel is defined by the mental instability of its main protagonist and (reliably) unreliable first-person narrator, Lawrence Miller. A young Englishman teaching at a small university in suburban New York while recovering from a broken marriage, Miller is the victim of an intricate conspiracy to implicate him in a series of killings - or so it seems.

Lasdun is an award-winning poet, and his prose is exact and sparse. The jump-cut narrative is central to maintaining the novel's pace, which increases in proportion to Miller's mental deterioration, as the miasma of sexual jealousy and domestic violence surrounding him emerges. A bleak New York cityscape provides the backdrop to this intermittently dazzling but over-stylised first novel, as it hurtles towards its striking but unlikely denouement.

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