This book is simply amazing. I think it may be the best novel of this length (more than 800 pages) that I've ever read. It's witty, compassionate, lyrical and masterfully paced. The characters are enchantingly eccentric, the footnotes are brilliant, and there wasn't a paragraph I found boring or unnecessary. Immersive, compelling, solidly grounded in fairy tale logic, historical fact, and English humor... very hard to put down!