Isaac and the Egg, the debut novel by Bobby Palmer, opens with Isaac Addy standing on a bridge at sunrise and considering whether to jump. He can’t recall how he got there though the taste in his mouth suggests he has been drinking. He can see his car at the end of the bridge, with the lights on and the driver’s door still open. Looking at the water below, Isaac lets out a scream of despair, at which “the weir stops bubbling, as if it’s paused to listen. The forest holds its breath. Time seems to stand still. Then, out of nowhere, something screams back.”
Isaac immediately goes in search of the source of the noise. What he finds is not an animal or a human but a living, breathing egg, about two feet tall and “eerily” white, “like a pearl at the centre of the biggest oyster on earth … In his heart, Isaac knows the egg has been abandoned. Like him. He already knows he’s going to take the egg home.”
There are deliberate echoes of ET in this story of an otherworldly being – one with the same shuffling gait as Spielberg’s alien – discovered by a human who sees in him a kindred spirit. The actor Johnny Flynn provides a terrific narration, capturing the book’s quirky humour along with the intense loneliness of Isaac, whose life has gone awry ever since his wife, Mary, died. Part fairytale, part whimsical comedy, Isaac and the Egg is a tender story of love, grief and the transformative power of friendship.
• Isaac and the Egg by Bobby Palmer is available via Headline Review, 7hr 25min
Further listening
Send Nudes
Saba Sams, WF Howes, 4hr 56min
Victoria Fox narrates this variously funny and poignant short story collection about teenage girlhood and coming of age at a time of uncertainty and fear and fear.
This Is Not a Pity Memoir
Abi Morgan, John Murray, 7hr 44min
The Welsh playwright and screenwriter’s intimate and frank account of her husband’s hospitalisation from encephalitis, when he was put in a medically induced coma, is read by actor Fiona Button.
