The charisma and damage of madness gives a desperate, lyrical glamour to Jenny Offill's debut novel Last Things. Eight-year-old Grace Davitt's mother Anna is an ornithologist with a passion for knowledge. Not the sort that comes in dry and dusty lists in factual books but the intense matters of life and death with all their beauty and harshness.

Anna's imagination is inspiring, defiantly off-kilter. She paints the spare room black and draws upon it the cosmic calendar--the history of the world recreated with glow-in-the-dark stars. She has a birthday party for the earth--"it was 4.6 billion years old, so no candles, she said"--and employs a boy genius who has a dream "that one day entire cities might be illuminated by mould" to baby-sit.

Everything goes awry on a road trip to New Orleans "where there is always a parade" and where money and food and sleep are in short supply. There is the wistful hope that "someday we would drive our sweet-smelling car home, saying, We always thought of you. You never for a moment left our hearts". They do arrive home but soon after Anna fills her coat pockets with stones and drives into the lake.

Jenny Offill tells the story with a melancholy elegance; evolution, extinction and madness sparkle like stars in this wise and wonderful tale of knowledge and loss.