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It is absurdist comedy of the very blackest kind, informed by a love of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Peter Cook and The Goon Show. Featuring the Fibonacci sequence, floors that open up without warning, a powerful laxative, and a duvet that periodically changes colour, 'Verruca Music' charts the narrator's emergence from a state of fearful near-immobility assisted only by entertainments of his own devising. A most usual (and surprisingly accessible and funny) book if you're willing to stick with it.

This is a funny book, funny-strange and funny-ha-ha. All the writing leans towards the absurd but mostly without the capital A. These are the kind of pieces where you want to go right back to the start of a story once you've finished it to see what you missed. They are slight but tightly written and they treat the reader with respect. Krüger leads you along the garden path and then leaves you to find your way home yourself. That may annoy some readers but I was far from annoyed and I'd happily read this guy again.

There are no reasons for unreasonable things. Following in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett's tramps from 'Waiting for Godot' Milligan and Murphy finally cut the ties to their ma's apron strings and head out into the big bad world. But they are not alone. Someone is looking after then. Someone else is cycling after them. Will they get to see the sea and once they have what then? Scottish author Jim Murdoch's new novel is an existentialist delight.

Tonya Cannariato is the first to review Jim Murdoch's ebook 'The Whole Truth' which at one point she compares to Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'. It's a book containing two novels (which originally appeared separately as paperbacks) in which an old man ends up spending three days with the personification of truth for company. Philosophical, metaphysical, surreal and darkly comic by turns.