Plot? Well, there isn't one as such. But this is Nicholson Baker not Agatha Christie, so plot's not what you get.

What you do get from Baker is a novel about a man who gets up around 4.30am every morning, stokes a fire, sits before it and contemplates the material details of his everyday existence - discussing everything from the way a paper napkin burns to the way that a human yawn helps to lubricate the eyeballs.

It's life's petty details that Baker is interested in, exploring them almost obsessively as he reveals his character's innermost thoughts. Just thoughts, seemingly banal and throw-away in the context of our thirst for sensational literature, but curiously beautiful and moving.

Such a project could have produced a narrative that seemed superfluous or flabby, but the text is direct and readable, even honest in its sublime portrayal of the everyday.

In representing the things that no one else does - those things that go unsaid or unexplored in literature or even seem unworthy of saying to so many - Baker has taken the simplest tale, that of our domestic existence, and told it so well that it reads almost like a work of genius. A true masterpiece.

Updated: 09:28 Wednesday, June 18, 2003