Meg Carpenter is a writer living in a damp Dartmouth cottage with her useless partner Christopher. She once wrote the beginnings of a very promising literary novel, but she’s never got around to finishing it and instead earns her living by ghost-writing genre fiction and by reviewing popular science books. Oh, and she’s in love with an older man, the married director of the local maritime museum.

One day Meg reviews a book by the science writer Kelsey Newman: The Science of Living Forever, about the end of time and its never-ending afterlife, or something – cue lots of philosophical debate about the meaning of life and all that.

There’s also a lot of philosophical debate about the novel in this novel: debate about narrative and about the ‘story-less story‘. In fact there’s so much debate, and so many people sitting around contemplating all these big philosophical questions, that not a lot actually happens in the novel itself.

Don’t get me wrong, Meg is a sympathetic, likeable character; there is a plot of sorts, and some of the ideas and concepts put forward by Newman and other characters in the novel are really thought provoking. However, for me there was just too much ‘cleverness’ about the whole thing, there was too much navel gazing, to the extent that I quickly became bored and came close to giving up.

I’m glad that I didn’t though, because on the whole Our Tragic Universe was an enjoyable read. Thomas is a skilled writer, adept at conveying complex theories in an accessible way, and the descriptions of Dartmouth and the surrounding Devon countryside were an especial treat for me because this is an area I know really well. I just wish there’d been more story to this story-less story, and less philosophising over purgatory, heaven and narrative.

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