Lobster, by Guillaume Lecasble, translated by Polly McLean (Dedalus, £6.99)

This is part of a new series from Dedalus, the publisher of odd stuff, called Euro Shorts, which the publisher defines as "short European fiction which can be read from cover to cover on Euro-star or on a short flight." Well, if you are going to start with Lobster, you are going to have an interesting journey.

As you will not believe me if I summarise the book's plot myself, permit me to quote the first paragraph of the blurb. I assure you this is not idleness; it is to establish maximum veracity. "Aboard the Titanic, Lobster watches Angelina devour his father, before being plucked out of the aquarium himself. Just as he is put in the boiling pot, the ship hits the iceberg and the pot is thrown to the floor. Lobster survives, with some changes; he finds himself sexually attracted not only to a human, but to the very human who ate his father. He gives her one life-changing orgasm before their tragic separation, following an ugly incident in one of the lifeboats."

You are now probably saying one of two things. "You have got to be kidding," or, more urbanely, "French, is it?" No and yes. I am not kidding, and, yes, it is indeed French. It could be nothing else. Moreover, all the events described above have taken place by page 24; we have not even got to the frankly appalling incident on page 32 when Angelina makes an ill-fated attempt to reproduce Lobster's amatory prowess with another, less gifted crustacean.

I imagine by now you have more or less made your mind up whether this book is or is not for you. If the latter, though, you are missing out. Fiction like this simply doesn't turn up that often, and when it does, it can get dismissed as bizarrerie or, more condescendingly, pseudishness. This shows a regrettable tendency in this country towards what may be called the nursery-cooking style of literature. If it's not immediately identifiable as a kind of prose with which we are on firmly familiar terms, it goes out the window. This is great news for Tony Parsons but not necessarily for us.

On the other hand, I hardly know how to classify this myself. It looks like surrealism: after all, the lobster was one of the surrealists' favoured animals, and Gérard de Nerval famously walked one around on a leash in the streets of Paris because, as every schoolboy knows, they were silent and knew the secrets of the deep. You may, though, feel that Lewis Carroll wrote the last word in lobster-related literature with "The Lobster Quadrille". ("You advance twice ... change lobsters, and retire in the same order.")

But this is not simply surrealism. It is, while written in a deliberately mannered fashion (unavoidable when one of your heroes is called, simply, "Lobster"; at one point I found myself regretting that Lecasble would have been obliged to call his novella "Homard"; but it turns out that he used the weirder English word for his original, which shows an encouraging sensitivity to the sounds words make), quite realistic in tone, stating bald and indeed uncomfortable facts with deadpan seriousness.

This deadpan tone does mean it's also funny, in a way, but this is a kind of appalled laughter, a salute to outrageousness, the daring of what is unfolding before you. There are, after all, only so many laughs to be had from maritime disaster, involuntary clitoridectomy, tender father-daughter relationships, suicide, and the geography of Paris, to name but five of the subjects this book touches upon.

Symbolism? The second paragraph of the blurb, which I shall spare you, hints that this might be the case, but I have never gone in for symbol-hunting and believe, with Sam Goldwyn, that allegories should be left in the Nile where they belong. Is it a joke on us? No - Lecasble means it. There was a Lobster-shaped hole in world literature which has now been neatly filled by this remarkable work.

All I know is this: by the time you stumble out into the Gare du Nord, you will be a different person to the one who boarded the Eurostar. You may also find yourself with a most unsettling craving for lobster.

· To order Lobster for £6.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.