There is a veritable feast of blithesome humour at work in this capricious and mischievous collection of poetically tinged writings. Hughes absorbs the raucous cityscape of his adopted home, Oslo, with occasional forays into London and the Northwest of England, producing a modern psychogeographic blend of prose and poetry.

Twisted Logic’s idioms and language have a spirit level that bubbles through the cracks and fissures of meaning producing an effervescent cocktail of crassness and veneration. When there is melancholy and deceit, there is a hope on the horizon. If there are desires, there are playful undercurrents buoying the reader up.

Wade O’Leary, Hughes’ chastened painter, found elsewhere in some of his previous books, is a tragic artistic ambassador who again surfaces in this collection. He acts as a literary foil of flawed liberation and absurdity.

Hover hawkishly through it, with one eye savouring skullduggery and peppery banter of the everyday, the other on its savior-faire. It is a beautifully honest vision of wit and melancholia in an age of derision, magic, and flux, a world that awaits you, as we do, and don’t seize it.