All you need is whatever a flag of convenience brass plate incorporation

"All you need is, whatever, a flag of convenience, brass plate incorporation." In this Odyssey gods and mortals, kings and enchantresses, Cyclops and Penelopes are small, inglorious, everyday creatures, neither less horrible nor less fate-bound than their illustrious predecessors.The most striking aspect of is its language, a baroque "Espangles" coming into its own: "Ay no, muchacha, it hurts. It hurts just to remember that, just my hand touching your warm skin through a dress. A tightening in my throat, va, pues." Anyone who has spent any time in New York, Los Angeles or Miami will recognise (with either vivas of approval or shit, mans of regret) the rich, rhythmical prose of those Pan-American streets, which Goldman so deftly handles. Memories, daydreams, visions of sex and death, descriptions of war, moments of half-magic and nightmares - all build up the waiting-time, fill the empty hull of the skeleton ship half in Spanish, half in English.It is true that other writers have made use of the doomed journey, notably B Traven in The Death Ship, Katherine Anne Porter in Ship of Fools and Julio Cortzar in The Prizes, but in these novels both the vessel and its voyagers seem too obviously and dogmatically symbolic.

Goldman's ship is less imposing, its adventures (or lack of adventures) less literary. Precisely for that reason, the novel suggests other readings besides the mere tale of a drawn-out waiting. One is mythical: the story of how a society comes into being. Abandoned by the bosses who summoned them, transformed into outsiders, given neither permission to enter the city nor a purpose to leave it, the sailors are forced to form their own community, dream up their own history, create their own leaders and, of course, their own outsiders in a latino version of the settlement of America.Another reading is political. can be read as a parable about the inability of the most powerful city in the most powerful country in the Western world to give a mission and a purpose to those washed up on her shores, to find for them a place in its national ambitions, to fulfil the promise engraved on its Statue of Liberty. In fact, it is almost without irony that the statue of the torch-bearing Lady becomes, for the sailors, an emblem of their own immobility in a forecast made by Bernardo, the one sailor who must in the end, like all prophets, die: "When that statue walks, chavalos, this ship will sail".

The ship's ultimate fate (which mustn't be revealed) neither confirms nor denies Bernardo's prophecy.. Stewart Park is everybody's worst nightmare His face is like a long, tapering wedge of Cheddar cheese. A single look sends mothers in the local playground scurrying to the police, turns a prostitute's eyes pale with fear. There will be people not sleeping well tonight because of him. Stewart is also the narrator of Freezing by Penelope Evans (Black Swan, pounds 6.99) and the most unusual and endearing fictional sleuth I have ever encountered His world is that of London's underclass.

He lives at home with his ancient, complaining Dad, who takes things to pieces to see how they work and who is gripped, serially, by mad enthusiasms - home security, fishing. By day, Stewart is a photographer in a morgue. By night he fights, courtesy of his computer, alongside Dustraiser - who will save the Ice Maiden.Enter the real Ice Maiden, the corpse of a young girl pulled from the Thames What follows is an extraordinary odyssey. Innocent, simple, ugly Stewart blunders along the trail of the anonymous dead girl and the pre- programmed Dustraiser develops a mind of his own.Minor characters (and real treats) along the way include Lady, the pitbull with a heart of gold, Wayne Dodds, the chilling policeman with whom Stewart went to school, and Angie, the fat nurse who makes him realise that perhaps he isn't everyone's worst nightmare after all. But the best thing about this novel is the way it enters Stewart's mind and portrays the sophisticated world to which we are all accustomed as incomprehensible.