The Envy of Topshelf

Welcome to Fizzle, an isolated, backward place teeming with crisis. It is a nation like none other on Earth, and to survive in it, citizens have developed a state of mind equally unmatched.

With an antic group of revolutionaries on a quest for truth (more or less), the termination of a great warrior caste, and a pair of exiled lovers, twinned in ambition (one has discovered the urge to write a beautiful, sublime poem, and the other desires to avoid hearing it), Fizzle is a state of constant flux. Add to the mix a 500-year-old murder mystery, an offended comet aiming for vengeance, and an overseeing deity who delights in human bewilderment, and you have the key ingredients of author Kevin Mulligan's visionary novel, "The Envy of Topshelf."

A 1,200-year-old monarchy has recently collapsed, and the result is two decades of civil chaos, toggling between the comic and the tragic. Just when the political leadership thinks it has finally achieved stability, havoc cries out for second helpings.

"The Envy of Topshelf" is literary farce with an epic scope, Swiftian outlandishness infused with slapstick urgency.