Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2010, Tom McCarthy’s novel is so difficult to summarize that we’ll just quote the Booker jury themselves, who described the book as “a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flightpaths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fueled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.”