A saving account

Los Angeles is a surreal city which, to non-Americans, is filtered through CSI; shots of Britney's run-ins with the paps; and Paris's fully made-up face pouting out from her prison mug-shot. In Amy M Homes's (pen name A M Homes) wonderful offering, LA is where fire and water always win over the super-powerful, uber-rich humans, and where Richard Novak's house on the hills is giving way.

In fact, in this sublimely crafted work of fiction it is not just Richard's home which shifts: his eating habits go from holier-than-thou no-carb deliveries to stopping by Anhil's doughnut place to stuff his face with the reality of an exploding raspberry jam exemplar. Richard starts to shed the people around him, including his nutritionist and his personal trainer, like an old skin which has grown too tight and restrictive. All because of what the reader surmises to be a heart attack, but which, until the end of the book, is never verified. Richard's body has rebelled against him in spite of its huffing and buffing by LA's body-perfect treatments. So he takes to the metaphorical streets and rebels back.

Once the doughnut goes past his tastebuds and hits his gullet, nothing remains the same: his relationship with his son, once inexistent, suddenly takes on the heart-breaking emotion-laden patina of real life as they seek to stuff a lifetime of flavour back into it. Everything around him, from the sexual encounter with a woman who has had a mastectomy due to cancer and saving a woman abducted in the boot of a car, to the discovery of famous neighbours and John Lennon's car in their garage, becomes more real than surreal.

Which does not mean that the weirdness of la-la LA land does not creep in. Novak's regular doctor is away from his clinic due to his wife's illness and a new doctor comes in to replace him. He later turns out to have been a hack, but in the meantime, he sends Richard off to a silence retreat, where eating cardboard-like food and sitting "on spots" for meditation is de rigeur.

Some of the incidents are hilarious. On one occasion, Richard's son points out Bob Dylan in their neighbour's kitchen. They mistake him for a cleaner and later exclaim at how "old" he looks. Richard also meets one of his neighbours and innocently tells her that he loves watching her swim laps in her pool from his house. A week later her house is for sale.

The author turns this man, who had previously only stuck to his money-making, society-shunning ways into a paragon of kindness, a hero for the modern age. He saves a horse from a sink-hole, the same hole his house is breaking down into; befriends a housewife who has been "forgotten by her family" when he finds her weeping in the produce section, and in the process, saves himself.

Ms Homes's massive strength is the kind of literary power which makes you want to look up all her books three pages before you've run out of this one because suddenly, here is an author that understands and fulfils you.

This power lies in her sublime storytelling, which is almost old-fashioned in its simplicity of prose yet which, as in her previous best-seller, The End of Alice, where she tells a palm-wringing tale of paedophilia across two generations, touches on the sorest of boils. In all of Ms Homes's writing, there is no tweaking with words, no irony for the sake of it, and definitely no Douglas Coupland-style self-referencing.

This is pure Americana. Still, even if the story could only physically take place in LA, the emotions are universal. The reader's life becomes intertwined with Richards', the characters your neighbours and the doughnut your breakfast. And it is your life that is saved.

• In Mr Borg's mind, this is a book that is easy to read, but difficult to write.
• A review copy of this title was supplied by Merlin Library.