Miranda Romanac is about to have her heart broken. It was why she came back, for the high school reunion. James Stillman. First boyfriend, smart, sexy rebel. She’s had a life - a successful New York book dealer - but even now realises that nothing has ever quite matched up. But he died. Three years ago. Car smash.

So Miranda goes home. And everything is much the same, except that, maybe, it’s like someone bricked up a window. Everything is just a little less without James Stillman in the world. And then she meets Frances Hatch, an ugly woman (she’ll say it herself), but former mistress to movers and shakers and artists. A charmed life.

And Hugh. Who is married and has a family but who looks uncannily like Miranda’s lost love. Who even knew James Stillman, the art dealer. The man she has waited for all her life. They are in love and things can all be right again. Frances wants them to have her old house in Crane’s View, wants everything for Miranda and Hugh. Life can be extraordinary.

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with Kissing The Beehive, but Jonathan Carroll’s last novel - first for four years - confounded many. After years nurturing a distinctive brand of Magic Realism, suddenly a book that prodded us towards revelation only to fall heavily back on the side of reality. A satisfying but curiously off-message read. The Marriage of Sticks is anything but. As someone once said, reading Carroll really can be like dreaming with eyes open.

At best, his penetrating prose borders on embarrassing. He has a way of scalpeling under the skin, easing away the richest, deepest meats. It’s a seductive methodology, a way of insinuating these lives into your own, of folding arms about you in what, so often, turns out to be a suffocating embrace. Not that it’s without dangers. Halfway through this gloriously involving book - just after he’s heartbreakingly pulled the rug right out from under you - Carroll’s novel teeters on the edge of Stephen King obviousness. Crane’s View (the town where much of Beehive unfolded, this latest going a long way towards explaining its predecessor’s purpose), is small-town Kingworld and Carroll looks mired before turning the book on a sixpence. It’s funny-sad, written with an evident fascination. We care about Miranda. Almost too much.

The usual signifiers - doggish mysticism, casual magic - are all present and correct, Frances reads like the shamanistic Venasque on a low light, and Carroll’s voice is as beguiling as ever. "On the surface I was a briefcase and a business suit," says Miranda, "but my heart was always looking for wings." And it doesn't matter if you believe everything; once inside we’ll buy into anything as his Truth. It’s what makes Carroll great. "In the end, each of us had only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it." Spellbinding.