The girl in the story is both conduit and activating conscience. Through her clairvoyance we experience what her grandmother, who lives in a beech tree, terms 'the noise of time'. Has she been reading Mandelstam, whose memoir of the name was absorbed in The Egyptian Stamp (1928), mourning the collapse of civilized rhythms before the iron might of the Revolution? In the same anti-naturalistic quest for fracture and 'seeing new', Mac Intyre expresses tenderness, pathos and beautyin this exuberant adventure with language.

Story of a Girl is kaleidoscopic and richly allusive - a mix of Parnassian clarity, ambiguity, colloquialism, vision and music. Freighted with historical flavour, literary echo and wild humour, Story of a Girl concerns itself with an altogether contemporary male quest for union with female redemptive energy. Its rollercoaster, freewheeling momentum at once engages and demands the reader's attention. For all its riddling capers, Story of a Girl is in direct and lucid descent from Mac Intyre's most recent work from Lilliput - the iridescent sequence of love-poems, Stories of the Wandering Moon, and the pilgrimage of yearning which he invites us to share in the play The Gallant John-Joe.