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A master craftsman at the height of his powers. I could have gone on reading this until kingdom come. If I had to compare Ondaajte's novels with a city it would be Venice. Venice which so eloquently visualises the poetic ordering demands of memory and the exalting aspirations of identity. Venice which is washed through with the simultaneously life affirming and melancholy tang of tidal salt water.

Warlight is a novel about the secret underlife of identity and about how we seek to construct memory in a narrative form to sustain a structure of order. Perhaps the most mysterious people in our lives are our own parents. Behind the domestic façade how much is hidden from us. Our parents perhaps more than anyone make us realise how much is censored and even left out in talk. When interrogated they stick to their cover stories, like the best undercover agent. They have a secret life of which we generally have little inkling. Thus if you're going to write a novel about a son seeking to piece together his mother's life after her death it's a simple stroke of genius to make her a secret agent. All our parents are secret agents. They exert as much energy in hiding themselves from us as making themselves known.

All the light in this novel is clandestine, evanescent, stolen or tricked from a felt pervading darkness. Narratively it follows the principles of memory. The bigger picture is always elusive; isolated detail as if picked out by torchlight has to be padded out to provide a storyline. As the author says at the end, "We order our lives with barely held stories."

As you'd expect with Onjaadte, Warlight is beautiful, poetic, romantic, fabulously constructed but, more surprisingly, it's also very exciting. The son, abandoned by his parents for the duration of the war, never quite knows the true nature of the roles played by the guardians of his adolescence nor is ever told where his mother and father are. All these guardians are exceptionally gifted and enigmatic people (you might say Onjaadte doesn't do ordinary people). Everyone has a secret life utterly unknown to our narrator the puzzles of which he will seek to piece together retrospectively as an adult. It's a novel with a big wise heart that makes you love life. Memorable images abound, like the nighttime river journeys, the midnight scalings of Cambridge's spired buildings, the lovemaking in empty apartments. The best novel I've read this year by a long shot and for me the most exciting book of the decade so far.