Living above a ramshackle Boston bookstore suits the hero of Sam Savage's novel very well, as there's nothing he enjoys more than devouring a good book - literally so, as Firmin is a rat, whose taste for literature first developed when he was born into a nest fashioned from a shredded copy of Finnegans Wake: "I was birthed, bedded and suckled on the defoliated carcass of the world's most unread masterpiece." His appetite somehow enables him to absorb the meaning of the material, and he'll ingest anything so long as it does not contain other rodents: "I despise good-natured Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I piss down the throat of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish-bones." Firmin offers a unique, low-vantage perspective on the world as he forms a touching alliance with Jerry, a self-published science-fiction writer. The final chapters are most affecting as the bulldozers move in, though Firmin remains loyal to his abandoned bookshop, in a rare instance of a rat clinging on to a sinking ship.