Just read

REVIEW QUOTES:
"A piece of invention as original as any of Tokien's or C. S. Lewis'."
--New Statesman
"One of those absolutely unclassifiable beauties that come along every so often, just as you've about given up hope of ever again finding a new book with a human voice behind it and a way of looking at the world that hasn't been predigested and pre-read...I wish I'd written it. It's one of a kind, and those are the only sort of books that mean anything to me."
--Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn

"Mr. Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. His narrative is so minutely and compellingly realistic that after a time you cease to notice that he has stood reality on its head."
--The Sunday Times (London)

"First novels of outstanding quality are so rare that they call for a certain amount of celebration. One's enjoyment of the novel derives from Mr. Hoban's unusually vivid imagination, his immensely striking use of words to describe the being-with-the-lion feeling in a world where there are no lions. And, finally, most welcome of all, his use of these powerful images in conjunction with a sense of the ridiculous which verges on the total."
--Auberon Waugh, The Spectator
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MEMORABLE LINES AND PASSAGES:
There is only one place, and that place is time. (p. 51)
"Why did [my father] never talk to me? Why did he always seem to be talking to a space that I hadn't moved into? Why was he always holding up an empty suit of clothes for me to jump into? He talked to clothes I never did put on." (p. 135)

There were times when it seemed to him that the different parts of him were not all under the same management. (p. 75)

...'I am glad to hear that,' said Jachin-Boaz, 'because the past is the father of the present, just as I am your father. And if the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.'
Boaz-Jachin looked at the maps on the walls. 'The past is not here,' he said. 'There is only the present, in which are things left behind by the past.' (p. 13)

and my personal favorite:
"It's dangerous to have balls, but there's something nice about it"...