A super-rich father is forced to bring up his only daughter on his own after his wife is killed in a plane crash and the child is born after the crash.

He gives her all that money can buy but money does not get you love. And his love turns out to have a darker side.

So begins this rollercoaster of a novel which switches from modern times to classical times passing through Shakespeare.

Through fights and near drownings, adventures morph into each other and somehow, despite the protagonists changing, the storyline holds.

This is a wild adventure of a novel, damp with salt-spray, blood and tears. A novel that soars and sails, and burns long and bright; a novel that almost drowns in grief yet swims ashore; in which pirates rampage, a princess wins a wrestler's hand and ghost-women with lampreys' teeth drag a man to hell - and in which the members of a shattered family, adrift in a violent world, journey towards a place called home.

The Porpoise is the name of a modern yacht but also of the ship of Pericles in classical times, first bringing him to plague-infested Tarsus and later the scene of a danger-fraught birth.

Just when you think the story is over and the protagonist is dead, something happens and he lives on.

Then comes the final section of the book, which I liked very much, and in a way brings the Pericles section to closure. The very first section too is brought to a conclusion but in a way you wouldn't expect it.

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, the Guardian Prize and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.