DRY January in the publishing world, a time of relative famine. Not many books come out in the first weeks of the year so here’s one I’m late to; you don’t want to pass on it.

The Glutton is AK Blakemore’s second novel. Her first – The Manningtree Witches – is set in 17th-century Essex. Staying with historical fiction, she now zaps us back to France in the 18th century where we meet Tarare, a young peasant buffeted by life during the Revolution. His adventures are based on a true story.

We first come across Tarare in a military hospital where he’s manacled to a wall. He’s guarded/cared for by a nun, Sister Perpetué, and tells her about his life from childhood to his experiences as a young citizen soldier.

We learn of his hunger, his uncontrolled appetite. He has eaten: “Corks and stones. Snakes and eels. Dogs and cats, alive.”

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He writhes in agony after swallowing a golden fork.

Why is Tarare so hungry? Does he have a parasitic infestation? Ascariasis? Tapeworm?

Maybe this is pica – where someone consumes substances with no nutritional value, like dry cotton – but this doesn’t explain the intensity of his desire for satiety. Another diagnosis could be hypothalamic damage – we see his stepfather beat him mercilessly around the head with the blunt side of an axe.

Tarare is presented as a holy fool, a sensitive boy, at the mercy of his wilier companions. He’s in the comic tradition of Baldrick in Blackadder, the butt of cruel jokes.

Loose talk gets him into all sorts of bother. He’s taken up by a group of wandering ne’er-do-wells. Their leader, Lozeau, exploits Tarare by putting him on stage in front of gawkers where he’s made to eat dead rats.

We’re in Randy Newman territory here, as with his song Davy The Fat Boy, featuring similar abuse. Isn’t he round?

There’s much joyous outrageousness in The Glutton as we watch Tarare scoff beef liver and lungs, with “mesentery juices running down his chin”. As with spectators at the fairs, we are voyeurs: “The more appalling a thing he does is, the more pleasure he brings them.”

Blakemore knowingly places us in Peeping Tom territory here. As with Michael Powell’s movie, our complicity in excess, in horror, is underlined. You might even say the author, uh, has her cake and eats it.

As a poet (her first poem was published in the Evening Standard aged 15!) Blakemore loves masticating on language, isn’t afraid of using archaic terms – wonderful words that have you reaching for the Oxford dictionary as with “pelagic”, “goliard” and “baldachin”.

Elsewhere streams “giggle” and rain “tickers”. Some phrases are as pungent as overhung game and reminiscent of Robert Nye’s chewy 1976 novel, Falstaff.

There’s a brilliant sense of invention in The Glutton, a delight in the ludic, an antic joy in just making stuff up. Fiction as an imaginative world that has one character say: “not everything has to be a story” only to be contradicted by a colleague that “… everything does. Everything is”.

But what is the nature of the world in The Glutton?

It’s a place where Tarare “faces down an existence of unrelenting, insatiable want”. A world where you must be like a wolf.

Blakemore’s epigram amplifies and is taken from Ecclefechan’s finest – Thomas Carlyle – and reiterates we need to be tough in this world. Blakemore acknowledges a stylistic debt to Carlyle’s history of the Revolution and gives Napoleon and Dumas cameo appearances.

Is there any hope for Tarare? Will the medical profession come to his aid? A physician – Dr Dupuis – is gentle, initially. Dupuis makes a point of regularly addressing Tarare by his name, a gesture that reassures, that makes Tarare “feel extant”. A mode of care we’d all wish for. But Dupuis has a surgeon friend, Courville, who wants to experiment on Tarare with emetics and enemas and is keen to perform a laparotomy.

Courville is a sadist – remember we’re in De Sade’s time – and feeds kittens to Tarare, speculates on his value as a cadaver. In time Dupuis too tires of his patient.

But you won’t. The Glutton is a tale for our times of gross avarice and cruelty. And Blakemore is a rising star, the real thing. Please Sir, can I have some more?