So you can get a good flavour of Little White Lies and Butterflies, I'll quote the back cover blurb, which is itself a quote from the book:

"Magnificent!" I said, staring out at spectacle more reminiscent of ancient Greece than any modern-day vista I'd seen before. I envisaged the great Poseidon suddenly heaving himself up out of the waters, only to hoist the opposing small island off its anchor in an angry god-like display.

"That's Telendos," explained the driver, as if reading my mind.

"It's incredible," I replied, still gazing out to sea.

The driver started his engine signalling it was time to set off again, leaving me no choice but to climb back into the car.

"I think I'm going to enjoy my time here," I said, as we followed the somewhat windy road down towards our destination.

Where to start? In the normal run of things, my answer would be "nowhere". To put things diplomatically, I'm not the target market for this book. But it has been lobbed in my direction as part of the Not the Booker prize, so I ought to share a few thoughts.

I could begin by attempting a practical criticism of the prose: that god-like god, that flood of present participles and that "somewhat windy" road. After reading 150 close-typed and poorly typeset pages of similar material, the desire to exact such revenge is strong. But it's not as strong as the sense of sadness and sympathy I had for the poor author. She's been fighting an unequal battle with the English language and there's no pleasure at all in kicking someone who's already been so badly beaten.

I'm hoping to concentrate more on the positive – which is to say, at least it's weird. I've never read anything quite like Little White Lies and Butterflies before. Have you ever seen a book in which a line such as "I think I'm going to enjoy my time here" is made the crucial finale of a pullquote before? We aren't going to get adventure. No peril. No lust. No long dark teatime of the soul. Just a vaguely expressed hope for mild fun – followed by a crazy clause about somewhat windy roads.

The WTF-quotient ramps up ever higher as we move through the story: a 21st-century attempt at a Jane Austen quest for a husband, only with most of the 21st century taken out, as well as nearly all the Jane Austen.

The narrator is a woman who doesn't want a career – she just wants a man. She's seen her mother try to hold down a job and also do all the domestic duties for her father, and decided it's just too tiring. There's no hope of getting men to do the dishes, so she might as well do them herself, and not worry about anything else. "All that 90s stuff about women being able to have it all and do everything, well it was alright in theory, but in practice it turned out to be just like everything else. It didn't work, did it?"

Her ideal man, meanwhile, will have neat short hair and no stubble, and be happy to bring home the bacon for her. She's dedicated her life so far to finding this man: dating, choosing outfits for dating, planning her wedding and training to be a doormat. Now, however, she is 30, and terrified that she's about to become unattractive to men, and – so the implication goes – worthless. She decides to take a holiday in Greece, a place where the language sounds to the narrator "more like a string of garbled syllables rather than any actual exchange".

It makes the Daily Mail look enlightened – but at least the narrator doesn't pretend to have much logic on her side, or even really to be right. It's just presented as the way she feels – and at least that's odd.

I won't dwell on the lack of Jane Austen. Tullett invites the parallel: "the idyll wouldn't have been complete without a bit of Jane Austen in the picture". Even so, comparing anyone to such a great writer is needlessly cruel. Suffice to say that there aren't any good jokes, there's none of that snappy dialogue and there's no tension around the courting of the husband. It's obvious what's going to happen as soon as he's singled out (he is, in fact, the only eligible man who gets any attention) and he starts speaking, "his middle-class inflection coming as a surprise, taking his shabbiness into account".

Anyway, there's more strangeness to relate. The white lie of the title turns out to be the narrator's claim to be a famous chef in the UK when she can barely cook. A series of bizarre coincidences sees her roped into catering for the wedding of the daughter of the owner of her lodgings. She's pretty worried about carrying this job out successfully, but luckily her family arrive from the UK and her mother takes charge, serving up beef and Yorkshire pudding to the delighted Greeks. The logistics of this meal are entirely baffling. I had many questions about where they got the English ingredients, how it was all paid for, why someone in the Greek restaurant trade with great connections on the island would turn to an English guest to cook his food anyway … but my main question was how on earth did that come to be the main plank of a novel? Cooking roast beef in Greece? I had a few issues with Neil Gaiman and the credibility of his psychotic wardrobe last week, but Suzie Tullett blew them right out of the water – even if she did so in a singularly non-explosive way. If you're going to write absurd fantasy, why not write absurd fantasy, instead of a weird story about Sunday dinners? I was left feeling baffled, unsettled and more than a little sad. So, I guess the book has some kind of egregious power – even if it is a long and somewhat windy road away from anything you might enjoy.

Next week: Anywhere's Better Than Here by Zoe Venditozzi