These three early novels should be welcomed with a bacchanal of the sort that you might find within their pages. Published between 1915 and 1917, they display a brittle, beautiful sensibility which is married to a mosaic approach to novel-writing. Without Ronald Firbank we would not have Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh or Henry Green. His ultimate descendant is William Burroughs.

His books are weirdly fluid tableaux, studded with jewels, full of peacocks, laughter and hidden sadness; oblique, glancing, beams of sunlight trapped in glass. His characters are effete, idle, existing in a world where art is effectively life. They are often described in terms that suggest they are dreamy: "She spoke habitually rather absently, as though she were placing the last brick to some gorgeous castle in the air." Firbank's attitude to plot can be seen in Vainglory which, in a series of hyaline vignettes, describes the progress that Mrs Shamefoot makes in her quest to immortalise herself in a stained glass window. Inclinations has a girl, not yet 15, heading off to Italy with a chaperone and falling for a seedy count. Caprice is a bit more conventional: a girl heads off to London with the family silver to make her fortune on the stage. All three fictions compress, distort, exist in the gaps of things.

Firbank's novels are often thought of as frivolous, but their very frivolity and artificiality is eminently serious. What are we but mosaics of sensation? This reissue is a reminder of what can be done with words, and may it reach a whole new generation of readers. Time to break open the champagne.