Guy Burt wrote a stunning debut novel, After the Hole, at a ridiculously young age when he was still at school, and followed that up with Sophie. The Dandelion Clock is his third, longest and most mature work yet, but it retains all the themes and qualities that made his first two novels so haunting and unforgettable: the loss of childhood innocence, first love, memory ... with everything cast in a slightly sinister, glittering light.

It begins with the narrator, a middle-aged artist called Alex, arriving in a mournful, rain-washed Italy in order to prepare for a forthcoming exhibition. But returning to this place where he spent much of his childhood also recalls to mind those sun-baked days long ago, with his friends Jamie and Anna. Burt is brilliant on the ways in which children think and communicate. "If you show me your lizards I'll show you my comics", says Jamie to Alex. And from that moment on they are the firmest of friends. Alex, however, is "strange": backward, slow, infuriatingly lost in a dream world of his own, while all around him, there are ominous signs of childhood vanishing, and darker forces breaking in. --Christopher Hart