A Snow-themed scrapbook

Encyclopaedia of Snow, by Sarah Emily Miano (Picador, £6.99)

It isn't hard to guess that Sarah Emily Miano is fresh out of the University of East Anglia's creative-writing course.

Everything about this debut effort is studiously smart, slippery and erudite (check out that diphthong). She even dedicates it to one of her old tutors, the late WG Sebald (and happens to be living with another one, Andrew Motion).

The other UEA giveaway is that it's rather good. In fact it's less an encyclopaedia than a scrapbook of snow-themed curios - letters, stories, quotes, puns. They're all signed, largely by fictional people, sometimes not - Blake's thoughts on the Moon get in, and there's something rather cheap and chilling about listing Captain Oates under "Lost" (the entry reads: "... hello, hello, hello. Is anybody out there?... out there, out there").

Flakes of story and suggestion swirl around to generally dazzling effect. But by the end you can't help feeling there's too much ice and not enough of the hard stuff.