Fade in ... Donald Delpe. Fourteen years old. A skinny kid, shoulders as meatless as coat-hangers. Queer-looking. No eyebrows, no hair. Face like a peeled potato."

Meet our hero, a bright teenager living in Wellington, with quite a lot going for him except ... Donald and an artillery of drugs are locked in a savage fight against cancer. Which sounds like a hopeless start to a narrative, but Donald is an engaging, credible character — and this is one of the funniest, saddest novels I have read for many months.

It is also written in a completely original format, which flows effortlessly. McCarten combines a straight novelistic format with a scripted text, and the action takes place in three acts. Like a play, when a character speaks, their name precedes the dialogue, which means McCarten can skip between the thoughts of each character with ease.

The scene-setting devices — example: "Int (interior). Oncology Ward/ Hospital. Day" makes the work highly visual.

There is an extra element. Because Donald is an imaginative teenager, and because he has to deal with cancer and potentially death, when the going gets tough he fades the people around him — family, doctors, nurses — into cartoon characters....