I like books that teach me things, especially if they have fictional framework. A good story, well drawn characters, nicely off centre dialogue and authentic sounding research that's the ticket, and Martin Cruz Smith's latest novel answers all these requirements.

It's the kind of book that I hated finishing rich, rare and with a totally sympathetic central character. Although the story is set in 1890s Wigan, of all places, the protagonist, Blair, is an apt hero for our time phlegmatic, obdurate in the face of surpassing odds, yet also tender and fierce in his belief in the power of love.

His profession is mining engineer, his true home Africa, but, down on his luck, suffering from malaria and in the bad graces of the Royal Geographic Society, for whom he had been working, he is obliged to take what he is offered in order to earn the fare for his passage back to the Gold Coast of West Africa.

Worldly Bishop Hannay, of a wealthy coal mining family, hires him to go to Wigan in an effort to trace the whereabouts of his curate, one John Maypole, who was engaged to the bishop's daughter, Charlotte.

On a day in January the same day that 76 miners perished in an explosion down the pit the young cleric had vanished from the face of the Earth, and now his superior has sent Blair on what appears to be a wild goose chase to find him.

A stranger in an exceedingly strange land and the author's description of the dun coloured town cloaked in its eternal miasma of coal dust is exquisite Blair finds himself caught between two class systems, further of which he understands.

On the one hand there is Bishop Hannay, his daughter Charlotte, and his nephew, the haughty and cruel Rowland "I wasn't really hunting. It's just that a gun lends punctuation to a walk" while on the other, the coal miners and their families put up a stubborn and senseless barrier to all and every inquiry.

The only one who aids Blair in any way is the pit girl, Rose Molyneux, one of the last people reputedly to have seen Maypole alive. After an inauspicious beginning, their relationship develops, first on the purely physical plane and then as something deeper and more enduring. And this in spite of the fact that Blair never sees her except through a glass darkly, at night, shrouded in shadow, glittering in the silver sheen of coal dust.

Her putative boyfriend, a street fighter cum-miner called Bill Jaxon, takes exception to Blair's interest in her and beats him up. But can there be something more sinister in his relentless efforts to dissuade Blair from his quest? It soon becomes obvious that the explosion in the mine and the disappearance of the cleric are interconnected, and finding out quite how makes Blair's life even more dangerous and insecure.

As I have already implied, the novel is full of subsidiary delights, not the least of which is the amount of information about (coal mining in the last century. At one stage, Blair goes down into the pit and there follows a long section in which we are incarcerated with him a thousand feet under the earth. If you've ever suffered from a fear of being buried alive, then this is not the book for you.

We are also treated to early forms of drug taking both Blair and Rowland snuffle up lines of arsenic to combat their malaria there is a wonderful description of the Cannel Room in the Hannay residence, where everything is composed of a form of polished coal we learn of the dangers of methane gas "Billows of methane lit softly in shades of blue, floating on the heavier air, lapping under the low roof, enveloping him in liquid light" and we find out why "The Song of Solomon" is so apposite for describing those strange hybrid creatures, the pit girls of 19th century coal mining.

At the heart of the book, however, is the love story that the author conjures out of such unlikely material and surroundings. Without ever becoming overt or gratuitous, he makes of Blair and Rose's conjunction a thing of surpassing eroticism and enduring beauty. And in a novel where different forms of disguise are endemic to the plot, the final and definitive unveiling of a true identity brings the story to a most satisfying conclusion.

I would urge you to seek out and read this very fine book. It is one of the best that I have come across in this, or any other year. {CORRECTION} 96070100056