I’m one of those people who believe that books aren’t for sharing at all. They’re for stumbling across, keeping closely guarded secrets - and our most precious books are all the more special because of that. I rarely read books that other people give me, and even more seldom cajole others into reading books I like. Which makes it all the odder that there is one particular book I’ve repeatedly bought for (a few select) other people.

Matt Ruff’s 2003 novel Set This House in Order isn’t on the surface anything different. It takes place in and around Seattle in the late 1990s and its hero, Andrew, suffers from multiple personality disorder (or, more accurately, is one of many personalities inhabiting an individual with that condition).

Andrew’s traumatic past has “torn apart” his soul, leaving dozens of different personalities, each with a different name, fighting for possession of his body (only one can be in control at any given time). With the help of a therapist, he has constructed a virtual landscape inside his head to contain these personalities. There’s a mansion (essentially a giant flatshare), a lawn, a forest and a lake with a mysterious fog-shrouded island, on to which Andrew and his fellow souls have banished a particularly unpleasant personality. Outwardly, this all allows him to live a normal life. Until he meets a woman, Penny, whom he realises needs help perhaps only he can provide – but at a huge cost to himself.

I first became a fan of Ruff when I read his second novel, Sewer, Gas and Electric, in 1997. It’s a bonkers parody of a William Gibson, set in 2023 in a world run by private corporations; fun but nothing special. I stumbled across Set This House In Order six years later and bought it with no real expectations – but discovered a beautifully constructed masterpiece. It pulls off a trick that Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting did; to take a subject that most of us would view with horror and create a world that we could imagine inhabiting.

Ruff could easily have bodged in any number or ways; it could have been a Stephen King-style horror story, or an overly complicated romantic comedy. But Andrew is interesting precisely because Ruff plays it very straight as a narrator. Yes, he keeps stuff from Andrew’s past from us – but only because Andrew himself doesn’t know it.

But none of that explains, on the surface, why I want to share this book. Then, reading it again recently, I was struck by something interesting (and possibly in retrospect obvious): this is in its very essence a book about sharing; about sharing everything about yourself with somebody. So maybe in some emotionally inarticulate way, when I give this book to somebody else, I’m saying a lot more than I ever realised.