When you’re feeling stuck in a rut, what you need is an eccentric aristocratic aunt in possession of a camel – one just such as belongs to Laurie, the narrator of The Towers of Trebizond. ‘Take my camel, dear,’ begins one of the most beguilingly daft novels we know – and the best admonition to step out of your rut and starting behaving in a capricious, plucky and effervescent fashion. Let Laurie’s Aunt Dot inspire you to live life as a true eccentric. You will never find yourself anywhere near a rut again.

Where others might lose their nerve and falter, Aunt Dot is unfailingly enterprising. So when Laurie, the thirty-something narrator, accepts an invitation from her Aunt Dot to travel around Turkey with the aim of founding an Anglican mission and emancipating the  Levantine women from their subservient lives, we know that she is set to have an entertaining time. Along too comes an opinionated septuagenarian clergyman called Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, who travels with a portable altar on which to conduct  impromptu mass, and the camel – a white Arabian Dhalur (single hump). With its tendency to cast spiteful looks and masticate with that ‘unpleasing sideways motion of the  lower jaw’ that dromedaries have, it gets them into a lot of trouble, but it also high-foots them out of it (see also: jam, being in a).

It’s when Father Hugh and Aunt Dot disappear together into Russia, bequeathing the camel to Laurie, that the novel turns from semi-farcical travelogue to soul-searching soliloquy. Because Laurie, a private girl, has been having an affair with a married man, a relationship she cannot hope to reconcile with her Anglican faith. She opens her heart to us and, with the camel as a catalyst, soon becomes as eccentric as her aunt, indulging her  passion for fly-fishing at every opportunity and acquiring an ape which she teaches to play her at chess.

The ending of the novel is heart-breaking and sombre, thus balancing out the uproariously silly start. Be encouraged to break off by yourself, to let your personality emerge in its full, quixotic glory. Perhaps you have been stuck in a rut because you are living in someone’s shadow – or the shadow of the person you thought you ought to be.

Hear Dot’s invitation to take her camel. Climb up. Let it take you to places you’ve never been, and do things you’ve never before allowed yourself to do.

See also: career, being in the wrong • change, resistance to • jam, being in a • Mr/Mrs Wrong, ending up with