Author Patrick Ness.Enfant terrible: Author Patrick Ness. Photo: Debbie Smyth

The sound that wakes George Duncan is ''a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt'', but, being the kind of man he is, the hero of Patrick Ness' new novel assumes it's his bladder. In fact, it's a dazzling white crane, brought down in George's suburban garden by ''some kind of terrifyingly proper arrow''.
Stepping forward to help the bird, George finds himself in ''one of those special corners of what's real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life''.
The next day, a mysterious woman called Kumiko walks into George's London print shop and changes everything.

<em>The Crane Wife</em> by Patrick Ness.The Crane Wife is a special novel: a perfect fusion of surreal imagery and beautifully crafted internal logic; the literary equivalent of a Japanese puzzle box with poetry, ideas and jokes twisting and sliding out of it at surprising angles.
''It's based, of course, on the Japanese folk tale, which I first heard at kindergarten in Hawaii,'' Ness says.
Though he's written for adults before, he is best known for his award-winning teen fiction. Now in his early 40s, there's still the intensity of adolescence in his speech, with the odd, self-effacing: ''Yeah, whaddever.''
In the traditional story, a sailmaker meets his wife after pulling an arrow from a crane's wing. She begins to weave beautiful sails for him and they become rich. Her only condition is that he does not watch her work.
But he grows greedy and - forcing her to weave faster - bursts down her door, seeing a crane making sails from its silken feathers. This breaks the spell and she flies away, leaving him bereft.
''It starts with an act of kindness and most folk tales start with acts of cruelty,'' Ness says.
''It's about human weakness. The sailmaker isn't a bad man, he just becomes a greedy man and it ruins the thing he loves most … People say happiness writes white and there's a point to that. But kindness, decency and doing your best are still part of the human condition and should be depicted in fiction.''
So he created the wonderful George, whose lovers find him too nice. ''And I began to wonder,'' Ness says, ''what a decent man would be greedy for.''
George's gentleness is balanced by his daughter's anger. Amanda is one of the funniest, truest characters I've read in years. She is the kind of woman who desperately wants to be friends with her colleagues, then wrecks a picnic with a hilarious, sweary outburst about her contempt for the Animals in War Memorial on London's Park Lane.
''Amanda is a lot like me,'' Ness says. ''I, too, have been asked to swear less. But I think a lot of people feel, like her, that slight disjuncture from others. That moment at a party where you're thinking about what to say and then the moment has passed. And the way that can turn to anger. You feel yourself getting so disproportionately angry at something petty.''
Ness has had letters from angry readers in the past, particularly after a newspaper article claimed his teen novels - such as The Knife of Never Letting Go - are ''so violent they need a health warning''.
He stresses that the letters never came from people who had actually read the books.
''If you read what teenagers write, it's much, much darker than anything a YA [young adult] author would publish. They write hopelessness, despair, suicide, murder. I don't think that's a bad thing. That's the age you're reckoning with stuff.
''And I think that if you're a YA writer who isn't engaging with that on some level, then you're leaving them to fend for themselves.''
Ness is best known for his children's book A Monster Calls, about a boy whose mother is dying of cancer. ''I need to write about darkness and violence not gratuitously, but as truthfully and respectfully as I can,'' he says. ''Then, when I write about good things - trust, friendship and surviving loss - they will take me more seriously.''
Ness brings all the lean vividity of his YA writing into The Crane Wife. In the end, he says, the novel is ''a story about love''.
''Because love, in a way, is the story you tell about the person you love. What story do you tell yourself? What story does the other person tell? The truth is in the conversation between those things.''
The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness is published by Canongate, $27.99.

 Telegraph, London