Shade by Neil Jordan, (John Murray, £16.99).

BETTER known as a film director than as a writer. the director of hits like The Crying Game and Interview With The Vampire, Jordan should, in a fairer world, be just as renowned for his fiction.

Shade is a beautifully written book, and is constructed perfectly; in short, it is everything that you could want from a novel.

Jordan's central character, Nina Hardy, has been murdered. Her body is never found, and her unquiet spirit - or shade - watches the aftermath of her grisly death cast long shadows across the life of her home village in Ireland.

Nina haunts this tale, and her haunting of her own life and its aftermath is the story itself. We know the manner of her death from the outset, but the why of it is what drives the book.

Nina's tale is also that of her half-brother, Gregory, and her two friends from the village, George and Janie. They meet again after Nina's death, and their narratives mingle as Nina's shade envelops them all.

The evolution of each character is elucidated, then, in relation to the others for the reader, just as we find they have developed in relation to each other in life.

This tale is everything that contemporary writing should be - formal experimentation in a genuine exploration of narrative and self.

Gregor Shepherd

Dramatic deaths are rather over-used in fiction, to lend pseudo-seriousness to tales in which they have no believable place. Jordan uses a dramatic death as the cornerstone of this novel, but it never seems fraught or overwrought for a moment.

I had never read anything by Jordan before this, and although I thought it would be good, I really had no idea of how good.