“Mum I’m a very disturbed young man”.

“No poppet you’re lost, that’s different.”

Shy is lost in a swirling, twirling spiral of sex, spliffs and sound in Max Porter’s small masterpiece, SHY.

There’s nothing shy about the prodigious talent on show here as Porter cements his formidable reputation as one of the most precise practitioners of contemporary writing in the English language, a virtuoso of the vernacular.

Winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Porter dazzles with a prose poem proficiency that is profound and sublime.

Liquid rustling, slip trickling, step by step, everything blueback, oily and sharp, moon back, slow tangled mesh in his thoughts.

Shy is an odyssey of the odd, the taunts and teasing that terrorise and trigger, of redemption from dark thoughts and deeds, of relapse, collapse, broken last chance and the huddle of hope.

The character of Shy is front and centre as we share his frenetic fears and care for his fragile state, his mental health resembling a laden, leaden ruck sack weighing on the shoulder of his aspirations, heavy on his back, holding him back, retarding his passage, his best foot forward.

Head in his hands, help comes in hugs from Steve and Amanda and helping hands from Nice Andy, the Bearded History Teacher, hirsute hope heralding that there’s more to life than drum n base. there’s more to life than getting wasted.

The joyful juggling of words, the deft, adroit, adept acrobatic tumbling of image, rhythm and syntax, SHY also glories in page design, the innovative fluctuation of font, split pages and a fearless use of blank space.

The book’s production is as exquisite as its contents from dust jacket to end papers.

Colossally good, blisteringly good, almost ecstatically good, SHY by Max Porter is nothing shy of superb.

SHY by Max Porter is published by Faber.