Even if you don't ordinarily read science-fiction or novels with werewolves, you will still enjoy The Sacred Book of the Werewolf since Victor Pelevin grounds his novel in a fund of everyday reality and tells his tale in easy-to-follow linear narrative. True, the narrator is a two thousand year old female werefox in the body of a sleek, shapely gorgeous sixteen year old girl, but, still, there is enough human-like traits to identify with her desires and aspirations and conflicts.

We follow our sly werefox, A Hu-Li by name, through a number of sexual encounters, frolicking adventures and emotionally charged relationships in Moscow 2005. What really adds a zesty flavor to this tale is the cross-species, supernatural qualities of several characters and how they transform and then interact with mere humans, or, in some cases, with other were-creatures, as per the below examples.

A Hu-Li also has a fox's tail, which she describes as follows : "When a fox's tail increases in length, the ginger hairs on it grow thinker and longer. It's like a fountain when the pressure is increased several times over (I wouldn't draw any parallels with the male erection). The tail plays a special part in our lives, and not only because of its remarkable beauty. I didn't call it an antenna by chance. The tail is the organ that we use to spin our web of illusion." And what a web of illusion! Enough to scramble the minds of any man she meets, any man, that is, who is fully human.

There are other magical, intuitive gifts that come along with being a werefox. A Hu-Li tells us about one such gift: "But thanks to our tail, we foxes find ourselves in a kind of sympathetic resonance with people's consciousness amplified when people take drugs. - his consciousness was hurtling along some kind of orange tunnel filled with spectral forms that he skillfully avoided. The tunnel kept branching sideways and Mikhalich chose which way to turn. It was like a bobsleigh - Mikhalich was controlling his imaginary flight with minute turns of his feet and hands that were invisible to the eye, not even turns really, simply microscopic adjustments of the tension in the corresponding muscles." Such a description is an example of the clear, vivid language we find in Andrew Bromfield's translation.

And here is a snippet from a section where A Hu-Li observes a special someone in her life metamorphosing into a full-fledged werewolf: "And then he sprouted fur all over him. The word `sprouted' isn't entirely appropriate here. It was more as if his tunic and trousers crumbled into fur - as if the shoulder straps and stripes were drawn in watercolour on a solid mass of wet hair that suddenly dried out and layered off into separate hairs." If you enjoy your literary fiction super-charged with such shape-shifting, you will love Victor Pelevin's spins of imagination and will gladly keep turning the novel's pages.

All of this fictional ingenuity and inventiveness combined with social commentary, especially commentary on Russian history and society, along with a healthy amount of metaphysics and Eastern mysticism makes for one first-rate novel. One last note: If you enjoy listening to Audiobooks, Cassandra Campbell's breezy, saucy voice is pitch-perfect as Pelevin's frisky werefox.