Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize An extraordinary, “playful, moving, and wholly remarkable” (The Guardian) coming-of-age novel filled with myth and magic from one of England's greatest living writers. An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock is trying to make sense of the world. Living alone in an old house, he spends his time reading comic books, collecting birds’ eggs, and playing with marbles. When one day a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears on a horse and cart, offering a cure-all medicine, a mysterious friendship develops and the young boy is introduced to a world beyond his wildest imagination. Luminous, evocative, and sparely told, Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth, folklore, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Everyone who read it had something strong to say about this short fairytale. Garner's vision of his universe was very strong and he brought in a number of powerful images and some beautifully written scenes. But what we got stuck on was what it all meant. Garner's vision of the boy who could see in two worlds and the comic characters and the dreamer in the bog was so consistent and strong, but there's no framing in the novel at all about how to interpret it and what it is saying about today's world. Is this a story of a boy who's ill and having a fever dream? Is he dead? Is it a metaphor for ... we don't know ... something? It was just really unclear what the novel was for. On the other hand, is it critical that the meaning be clear? Isn't it enough that the story was consistent and well-written? It was just so unusual to see an author nail a vision of a world so solidly but not ground it somehow in something we could understand. Ultimately, we didn't know exactly how to feel about it. It's certainly a very well written novel by a very talented author, but many of us wanted to go right back to re-read it just to see if we could figure out what was going on.