I absolutely love stories which have characters on journeys and quests, like Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and a wonderful South Seas novel he wrote called The Ebb Tide. Then there's Gulliver's Travels and a second century novel by Lucius Apuleius about a man who is metamorphosed into an ass, as well as American classics like As I Lay Dying.

I'm even a sucker for Kerouac's On The Road, which has got to be the stupidest quest-story ever told, with that idiot narrator, Sal Paradise, forever in a mystical ecstasy of longing to be someone or somewhere else.

Sal is only ever happy when he's traveling and can kid himself he's on some kind of a seeker's pilgrimage, but he has a sneaking suspicion his journey is nothing more than a user's carnival of drugs, kicks and 'scenes'.

He needs to deceive himself and can only do it by being 'honest' in bucketloads. It's not you he is trying to convince so much as himself.  But nowhere is the addict's signature note of frankness combined with a deep-down dishonesty more beguiling than here.  The innocent-faced deceitfulness is breathtaking.  And the suspense for me is, will he be able to delude himself all the way to the end?