Mike McCormack is the most interesting writer to emerge from Ireland over the past decade. His short story collection Getting it In The Head ranks with the great Irish story collections, up there with McGahern's High Ground and Desmond Hogan's Lebanon Lodge. Now, nine years after Getting It In The Head, McCormack has produced his second novel in which his early promise bears rich fruit. Notes From A Coma is, to be reductive about it, the story of JJ O'Malley, a young man brought from a Romanian orphanage to McCormack's home county of Mayo who feels himself to be at a skewed angle to society and existence. He eventually comes to believe that what he needs is to give his mind a rest, to stop the thoughts and worries which are impinging upon his sanity. This JJ does by signing up to an experiment whereby men are placed in a coma on a prison ship for some weeks. But a plot summary can't do justice to this marvellous novel. McCormack is the most individual stylist to emerge from Ireland since John Banville was a young man and there isn't a duff sentence in the whole novel.It's by turns moving and disturbing, austere and celebratory. McCormack tackles a great deal (the footnotes to the book are a brilliant work in themselves, an examination of the texture of modern society Thomas Pynchon would have been proud of). But it's also a simple story of love and redemption, of joys and comradeship and the awkwardness of everyday relationships in a changing West of Ireland which has never been captured as well as it is here. The Booker Prize committee let themselves down by not naming this book.