A novel, a confession, a poem, an autofiction, a commonplace book, a prose poem, The Thing Is will provide a new twist on the continuing adaptability of the form that we call the novel. Christopher Potter's book is a post-modern cabinet of wonders, an enigmatic, compulsive wander around his remarkable head, in words wondrously streamed out of his conscious: poetic, chaotic, crazy, sublime. Spooling back to childhood and into the future, like a half-remembered dream, it speaks to faith and infinity, filling the spaces in between with the kind of acute and raw observation that comes from an uninhibited, but deeply humane mind. An often hilarious game of word association, there's a little of Woolf and Joyce and Thomas Browne going on here - but a lot of whimsical fun too. The Thing Is is like being at the most fantastical cocktail party, and saying, or hearing, the most wonderful things