WHEN a debut novel is graced with endorsements by Roddy Doyle and Nuala O'Faolain, its promise knows no bounds.

Established authors do not dole out their blessings willy-nilly.

When they do, they ratchet up expectations.

Sheridan Hay is an Australian woman who has worked in bookshops and publishing and has already had a collection of short stories published. That she has no apparent ties with Ireland makes the recommendations by Doyle and O'Faolain (whom Hay thanks in the acknowledgements for "the deep pleasure of her company") all the more intriguing.

But does the novel live up to its billing? Well, yes, in most part it does.

It is a quirky, atmospheric coming-of-age story about an orphaned teenager with no siblings arriving in New York from Tasmania, equipped with an unopened gift from her surrogate fairy-godmother and a box containing her late mother's ashes. The girl, Rosemary, a vivid effusion of life with her cascade of blazing red hair, lands a job in a bookshop called The Arcade.

Part Alice's Looking Glass, part Cirque de Freak, The Arcade houses an extraordinary collection of social misfits, all truthfully but compassionately portrayed. Pike is the proprietor, as blunt as his name. Geist, the manager, is an Albino, ephemerally devoid of colour.

(Can it be a coincidence that his name shares a syllable with the word, poltergeist? ) Pearl, the book-keeper, is in the throes of gender-change surgery. Art is fixated with the male nudes in his book corner while Redburn, the shop-lifter, flits in and out.

Then there is Oscar, an elegant, asexual, know-all aesthete with whom Rosemary wills herself to fall in love, disastrously.

The plot involves the purported discovery of a lost manuscript written by Moby Dick creator Herman Melville and the various Arcade staff members' clandestine efforts to procure it.

This part of the story is predicated on historical fact . . .

namely, a series of letters written by Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . and, in places, it strains the seams between fact and fiction. Hay does not altogether succeed in letting the story absorb her academic knowledge, resulting in the occasional whiff of pretension.

Overall, though, it's an absorbing, memorable novel with a haunting timeless quality. Its touches of Dickens and Du Maurier lend it an ambiguity of time that is perfectly reflected by the whispering half-light of the Arcade's aisles.