Andrew Crumey is one of the few contemporary authors whose career has risen steadily in an old-fashioned way. He moved from small publisher Dedalus to Picador and has slowly gathered fans among literary editors, authors, the more vociferous Internet book-bloggers and, with his last novel, Mobius Dick, the reading public. If he hasn’t quite yet broken through, it seemed inevitable that his latest novel, Sputnik Caledonia, which has already received the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Award, would be the one to do it.

And maybe it will be. It’s the first of his novels that Picador is publishing straight into B-Format paperback (with a £20 hardback edition), which suggests that the publisher is keen to make it work, and the publicity materials place Crumey alongside David Mitchell, Jim Crace, Lawrence Norfolk and Richard