Have you ever stopped to consider where your thoughts come from, or at least how one thought leads to another until you have an unbroken chain that's taken you from an A to a Zed that have nothing in common with each other? That thing called a brain that's stuck up between our ears can do the most amazing things without us even noticing. One minute you could be talking about what you'd like for lunch, the next planning your own funeral.

In the early part of the twentieth century, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf began experimenting with a style of writing called stream of consciousness in attempts to chart the workings of the thought process. Since then, quite a few writers have followed in their footprints with varying degrees of success. Trying to recreate the continual flood of information that most of us process from second to second without it becoming an exercise in tedium is a difficult and painstaking process.

Ideally, the author will utilize stream of consciousness at points throughout a novel as a means of letting a character justify his or her behaviour, and to give the reader deeper insight into him or her. Of course, if as the reader we don't give a damn about the character it was all just wasted ink and paper.

Stepping into someone else's thoughts can generate a slew of feelings in a reader. But I must say that David Thewlis' novel The Late Hector Kipling is the first that's made me feel like I was rubber necking at a car accident, trying to spot the corpse as I drove by slowly. Published in Canada by Penguin Canada, this brilliant piece of satire about the world of contemporary visual art and artists charts the collapse of Hector Kipling's life from successful artist with loving girlfriend to nut-job.

Written in the first person, we are introduced to one of the most wonderful collections of misfits and dysfunctional characters I've had the pleasure of meeting between the pages of a book in the longest time. There's Kirk who paints pictures of cutlery, Hector's oldest friend Lenny Snook who does billboard campaigns for bottled water in his underwear when he's not doing award-winning conceptual art that involves filling a Cadillac with blood and digging a hole in a gallery floor.

But it's the world of contemporary art that is the true eccentric in this book. Hector has made his name by selling huge portraits of people's heads and is able to make a good living from the proceeds. But, he's not the one being nominated for an award. He's plagued with self-doubts about whether giant heads are what the world needs more of, and when a motorcycle accidentally drives through the centre of his first self-portrait, it's like a sign from the Gods.