Morten Pedersen is a student of Anglo-Irish literature and is currently travelling around Ireland

As the fella says, "It's many the moon would shrivel before you'd cross swords again with a book the likes of this." The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien (Paladin, £4.99 in UK), is rightly concerned with the love a man might bear for his bicycle, but this isn't the whole of his tale - not by a long chalk, it ain't. 'Tis a circumlocutious exegesis on the feverish conniptions of a murderous man and his peregrinations around a class of hell located somewhere between Borris-in-Ossory and the righteous inferno of Christian reckoning. We also have the cerebral musings of a great sage, De Selby, whose sufferance it is to know of the nature of those mass delusions of time, space and death and whose misfortunate fate it is to have these related in loving footnotes. And that's not even a fraction of a half of the great madness that resides between this book's covers.