GRIEF is fertile ground for fiction. Rarely, however, has it been used as movingly and, well, as hilariously as in Walls’s debut novel: a coming-of-age story set in the north-west of England. Orla is 14 and lives with her unemployed dad and baby sister, Lily. She is sassy, precocious, and desperately grieving the death of her mum. She decides to run away to Northern Ireland, where her mum is buried.

On the night she leaves, she crashes her bike into a man who claims to be Jesus. He is odd and other-worldly; he can raise animals from the dead, including Orla’s cat Sneaky. Thus begins the strangest friendship. Orla persuades Jesus to come to Ireland and resurrect her mum. Jesus, however, has his own mission, which will reconfigure Orla’s broken world.

Walls’s novel has many strengths: he captures the simultaneously sure and brittle voice of a teenage girl with barely a mis-step; he presents the messiness of grief with tenderness; and he takes a simple scenario and grants its unexpected depth. I especially enjoyed its absurdist aspects. This is a “road novel”, in the long tradition of Kerouac, but set on bicycles. Instead of making the novel silly, it makes it only more human.

Walls never explains why Jesus is in Lancaster. He simply is, and Orla’s reaction to him — hopeful, angry, frustrated — is entirely believable. At one point, she says that he is less the Son of God and more like a vampire. For all his oddness, Walls’s Jesus does not lack compassion. If Wall plays around with biblical representations of Jesus, I like how both he and Orla are often at odds with reality — rather like us when we grieve. Do read this novel: it will make you laugh and cry, and remind you of our need for connection and love.

Canon Rachel Mann is Area Dean of Bury and Rossendale, Assistant Curate of St Mary’s, Bury, a Visiting Fellow of Manchester Met University, and Archdeacon designate of Bolton and Salford.

The Gospel of Orla
Eoghan Walls
Seven Stories Press £10.99
(978-1-83841-599-0)
Church Times Bookshop £9.89