This book is a very funny, joyfully silly and rather beautiful piece of work.
My Iris stories don’t always get reviewed, for the simple reason that she has only a small - but exceptionally lovely - fanbase. That’s understandable: she is, as I have had to explain to my family more than once, a spin-off of a spin-off of a failed American pilot for a renewal of Doctor Who. But in all the years I’ve been writing for her, I’ve grown more and more fond of her. She’s a wonderful invention, with all the fun and unexpectedness of the Doctor but able to do so many things that a Time Lord with such a global fanbase just couldn’t. Like appear in a parody of a BBC sitcom from the nineties to talk about the value of lives that stray from the beaten track and the importance of being who you are and resistance.
So it was particularly pleasing when doing a casual online vanity search to find that Daniel Tessier had not only finished the book already, but he’d reviewed it. And more importantly, he’d loved it. I’d written such an idiosyncratic book, partly just to make Stuart Douglas laugh, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if nobody else had enjoyed it. And for the review to pick up on everything the book was doing, and to enjoy it … well, I’m a very happy person now.