Now in his early 30s, married to teacher Caroline and living in Kilburn with their young son, Jesse, Pol still has the appearance of a sprightly 23-year-old. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian ‘What misery to be wise’ … Greg Hicks as Tiresias in The Oedipus Plays by Sophocles at the National Theatre in 1996.

The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. I remember reading that passage when I was twenty-eight: fifteen years after my first heterochronous shock, six years before my second, three weeks after you were born. I was scrolling through NetGalley whilst requesting a couple of other books and the description of this one caught my attention. Son of author Frank Cottrell Boyce, he explained to the Guardian that the novel grew out of the “30,000 words of madness” he sent an agent who saw his short fiction in the avant garde quarterly the White Review and asked what else he was writing after they played football together. Meanwhile, the everyday conflicts and compromises he and Caroline experience are heightened by his condition and the response of the people around them to a man who is always either older or younger than he appears.Because they are so like us – the readers of the books – and so unlike us at the same time, prophets are uncanny and scary. Her rise, he fantasises, would transform the way people perceive his “history of doing nothing of note”. But then, this is a debut novel and, as a debut novel, it’s very clever and full of interesting writing and ideas.

Along with Playfere’s prophecies, their Cassandra voices also provide Pol with meaning: “Because of the pauperisation and disfranchisement of the young by the old … the time for revolution and the restoration of the youth right is nigh. In the course of a few days, my body had decided to undertake the same task that most human bodies undertake over the course of a few years. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.Nevertheless, an intriguing debut and one which captures something of the confused times in which we live (the lack of resolution and satisfactory narrative resolution being itself symbolic) while implicitly observing that societal chaos, generational conflict and predictions of imminent catastrophe are far from new.

Pol’s schooling is disrupted by his condition and his Irish mother reacts to his difficulties by coddling him.Meanwhile, Jesse begins acting out at school and Pol’s mother’s dementia and his own increasingly vivid dreams lead him to re-examine the knotty dynamics of his family. This is a distinctive novel, combining chronic illness, family, philosophical thought, and what gives people meaning. Told to his son in second person, his story of life with his wife Caroline – "your" mother – would be a fairly recognisable one (for all the ambivalence that such a word implies) were it not for its esoteric poles. At one end, Pol’s condition; at the other, his obsession with the writings of English Civil War Puritan Bartholomew Playfere. While tales of metamorphosis are deep in the collective unconscious, shapeshifting myths normally resonate because of their moral framework, or at least act to reinforce the commonplace that everything is subject to change.