All Quiet on the Orient Express

An unnamed narrator pitches his tent in the Lake District, planning a motorcycle trip to India. Before he can leave, Tommy Parker, who owns the campsite, asks him for a small favour: a simple painting job. He agrees.

One job leads to the next. The tasks that follow are stranger, riskier and more complicated each time, and the narrator never finds a way to say no or to get clear of them. Each one asks more of him than the last.

This is a darkly comic farce, the second novel by Magnus Mills, published in 1999 and written over four months. The title is a wry nod to a classic war novel. Mills keeps his prose plain and his delivery deadpan, so the absurdity lands as funny and tense at once.

The humour grows alongside the danger, and the pace never lets up. It is a quick read, and the question it turns on is whether the narrator will ever get away from the campsite and on to India.