One does not pick up a novel titled Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town expecting restraint. And Jorvik Parn,performance artist, multilingual cough drop salesman, and occasional sculptor of edible furniture,delivers exactly what the title promises. With this riotously strange and oddly poignant debut novel, Parn proves that literary fiction can be both conceptually daring and gloriously, unapologetically absurd.

The eponymous Grandma,whose real name, we are told, is “Lorna Widdershins”,rides into the dusty desert town of Hatwater, Arizona astride an iguana named Barry, trailing a cloud of cactus pollen. She claims to have arrived in search of the Thoughtful Thorn, a legendary succulent believed to flower only once every presidential impeachment. But her arrival sets off a sequence of events involving migratory watchmakers, and a local bakery that communicates exclusively in Morse code.

Narrating this sunbaked saga is Dr. Linus Ogle, a disgraced ethnobotanist-turned-hatmaker, who’s attempting to write a definitive taxonomy of Italian headgear. What begins as a documentary project soon devolves into something halfway between an existential awakening and a highly conceptual scavenger hunt. The story’s structure,if one can call it that,is a patchwork of desert diary entries, annotated botanical etchings, and excerpts from The Hatwater Codex, an unreliable manuscript said to have been dictated by a drunken cowboy during a terrible sandstorm.

Parn’s prose is glorious and of the highest order, oscillating between the lyrical and the downright lunatic. Here, for instance, is how Ogle describes a moment of spiritual vertigo: “The wind smelled of forgotten jams”. A perfect sentence.

Though Parn is often compared to Pippy Schell and Sally O’Brien, there’s something uniquely tactile about her imagination. Every page is steeped in texture, textile, terrain and temperament. The town of Hatwater is drawn in surreal but loving detail: its silent hat parades, its broken laundromat, its local economy powered almost entirely by barflies and barbers.

What holds the novel together,barely, but beautifully,is its earnest heart. Beneath the dust, scales, and millinery chaos is a story about the language of grief, the elasticity of family, and the strange comforts of miscommunication. Grandma’s journey, we come to learn, is not just botanical or symbolic, but deeply personal. She’s trying to bloom in a world that’s forgotten how to water anything but its own assumptions.

Readers who crave plot will be deeply confused. Those who demand linearity may run for the hills. But readers willing to surrender to Parn’s hallucinatory logic will be rewarded with a novel that is not just read but inhabited.

Grandma Rode a Lizard into Town is, ultimately, a book about the things we carry: our baggage, our bruises, our hats. Jorvik Parn has written a debut that defies categorisation. It doesn’t care if you like it. It dares you to keep up,and somehow, through all the surrealism and silliness, it makes you feel deeply seen.

It is a rare pleasure,indeed, a great privilege,to encounter a novel that is so well written as this startling and singular debut from the award-winning Plover C. Glint. She is of course the conceptual painter whose previous claim to fame involved a solo show of weather-reactive canvases that changed hue with barometric pressure. Glint’s novel, much like her artwork, seems animated by a conviction that language itself is both an aesthetic medium and an unruly deity.

To answer the inevitable question: no, My Toenails Are Ideograms is not about podiatry, per se. The title,plucked from a line uttered by the book’s elusive protagonist, Dr. Hesper Ving,is emblematic of Glint’s entire approach: playful, opaque, and steeped in a kind of ecstatic misdirection. The plot (a term used here with gentle flexibility) revolves around Ving, a former semiotician turned subterranean gardener, whose toenails begin to grow in geometric patterns that closely resemble extinct logographic scripts. As word of her condition spreads, Ving finds herself alternately pursued by linguists, wellness influencers, and a splinter sect of Neo-Gnostic calligraphers.

It sounds preposterous, but Glint executes the conceit with such intellectual bravado and painterly delicacy that disbelief dissolves. The novel is constructed in fragments: diary entries, annotated glossaries, synesthetic footnotes, and transcripts of interviews conducted by a German podiatrist, translated into sign language. The result is a text that reads as though Borges had been fed a steady diet of fermented turmeric and left alone in a stationery shop.

What distinguishes Toenails from mere postmodern pastiche, however, is Glint’s abiding attention to the sensory texture of language. Her prose is lush, tactile, often vertiginous. A particularly memorable passage describes a dream in which Ving’s feet sprout alphabetic plumage and lift her into the sky:

“Each toe unfurled like a vellum scroll, the symbols inked in lapis and milk. The wind turned my ankles into punctuation. I hovered somewhere between an ampersand and a sigh.”

Glint, one suspects, sees writing not just as communication but as choreography,a dance between symbol and sensation. Her visual training is apparent not just in the vividness of imagery, but in her spatial sense of narrative structure. The novel resists linearity, opting instead for a kaleidoscopic accumulation of motifs: avian grammar, fungal etymologies, the erotic potential of ligatures.

And yet, amid all the conceptual mischief, there is emotional gravity. Ving’s journey,strange as it is,functions as an allegory of bodily estrangement and linguistic exile. Her toenails become a site of both wonder and alienation: a part of her that speaks in a voice she cannot fully understand. Beneath the novel’s cryptic surface lies a meditation on what it means to live in a body that betrays, translates, and transforms.

My Toenails Are Ideograms will no doubt divide readers. For some, it will prove impenetrable, its digressions maddening, its humour too barbed or baroque. But for others,those who find joy in the cryptic, who believe literature should sometimes behave like an installation piece or a fever dream,it will feel like home.

Plover C. Glint has written an unusually profound book: absurd, intricate, and oddly luminous. One suspects it won’t be the last time we hear from her.