Through Edward Carey seems to intend his first novel, Observatory Mansions, to be an unsentimental, surrealist romance, it's really a paean to loneliness. For the book is never so interesting as when its characters are despairing and alone. All goes well then for the first hundred pages, where Carey lays out the solitude housed in Observatory Mansions, a graying apartment building where Francis Orme, the book's narrator, cultivates a secret life of stillness and theft.

From Richardson to Dickens to Ackroyd, English literary fiction seems to favour the elephantine. Miniaturists - Austen, Pym perhaps, Brookner - are rarer, less typical. Edward Carey is most decidedly a miniaturist. "Miniature things move people," he remarks, two dozen pages into his second novel; and again, a similar distance from the end.

An imaginary city: this is a time for such a vision, especially for New Yorkers, whose city has always been in flux, though perhaps never more painfully and self-consciously than today. Entralla, the fictitious metropolis at the heart of Edward Carey's second novel, exists not only in our imagination and in the pages of Alva & Irva (which serves as Entralla's one and only guidebook) but in the form of tiny plasticine models of its streets and houses, seen in the appealingly smudgy photographs that punctuate the novel. A re-creation of Entralla also appears in the story of Alva & Irva, since the twins of the book's title are the designer and sculptor, respectively, of their native city in miniature.

• Interview with Edward Carey, Harcourt Trade Publishers