The devastatingly beautiful Ringmaster's daughter

Sometimes, just sometimes you read an extraordinary book that you feel compelled to share with the World.  You find then, that no one you know has read it and thus, you have no-one to talk about it with.  This book by Jostein Gaarder is one of those.  A book which contains so much brilliance, extraordinary talent and food of thought, that it astounds you and makes you wonder how it could be conceived by the mind of a mere individual.  This author has an astonishing sense of making you look in the world in a different way.  If I find one of his books in a charity shop, a rare occurence, I consider myself fortunate.  The main character in this book is a genius, but one who is morally/socially different.  He has an amazing mind for creating book and film ideas and synopses, which he ends up selling to struggling authors, secretly.  He ends up responsible for the large majority of successful novels.  Known as the Spider, he has built a whole web of deceit which ends up trapping himself with awful consequences. The story tracks his childhood to adulthood in which we wonder at Petter who seems a strange, otherwordly character who can see through the foibles of others, can analyse and know what is going through their mind in an instant, views them with disdain yet with detachment- such an interesting character.  A brilliant part of this book is the inclusion of a series of synopses and short stories which this character wrote which are really imaginative stories, the like of which I hadn't thought about- bizarre, striking, horrendous!  It has an overarching theme of the search by a father for a lost child that adds a real air of tension and real sense of loss and something being missing or not right throughout and this only adds to the beauty of the story.  The denouement is devastating to say the least!!!!  If you buy any book this year, wanting to read something different, I strongly suggest this one- it is utterly brilliant and unique, unlike any book I have read in a while! Even better than Maya, which I reviewed in June/July and Hello, is anyone there? Even better than his most famous book Sophie's world.  I've even pasted the link to Amazon so you can buy it!