The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg – review

A man and a woman meet, their canoes side by side in the icy sea. He is a Nord, the first of his kind ever to circumnavigate the early Earth, and she is from the south pole, where he has just landed. They fall in love, but a peculiar magnetic force field means that they're unable to come within a 2ft radius of each other. Instead of pressing their lips together, they can only kiss pieces of paper and blow them to each other. Instead of sleeping in each other's arms, they can only swap sides of the bed, the better to lie in the warm hollow made by the other. At night, in dead of winter, they cannot so much as brush fingertips, so the Nord man whiles away the dark hours in their igloo by telling her the story of how he journeyed to her via a land called Britanitarka, a place of tall trees and black fjords, and a city called Migdal Bavel, which was ruled by the fickle Sun King.

If some of this – the bit about the icy sea and the magnetic force field – sounds familiar, that's because it has appeared on these pages before, albeit it in a different form. In 2011, Isabel Greenberg, an illustrator recently graduated from the University of Brighton, won the Cape/ Observer/ Comica graphic short story prize with Love in a Very Cold Climate, a tale of impossible and exceedingly chilly romance. For Greenberg, as for several of those who have won the prize since it began six years ago, this was a turning point; I remember the morning I passed on her details to the man who subsequently became her agent as if it were yesterday. And now, two years later, here is her first book, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, a gorgeous epic whose prologue comprises an edited version of her prize-winning story. It goes without saying that I read it with huge enjoyment; this is an exquisite book that will be loved by children and adults alike. But I felt a touch of pride, too. Our discovery, between hard covers! This is something to cheer.

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth is a compendium of Nord Man's stories: the day he was swallowed by a whale; the day he was rescued by a giant-slaying poisoned-sausage-making old woman; the day he found a golden snowflake. But it's also a guide to Early Earth: to its creatures (the gump and the nuffin), and to its people (why are the Dags and the Hals of Britanitarka sworn enemies?) There is even a field guide to snow, for which those from the Nord have 1,001 different words. Strange, funny and beautifully drawn, it's as if – oh, how to describe it? – Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's Noggin the Nog had been reimagined by Tove Jansson. And yet, its author also has something that is uniquely her own: a sweetness, and an ear for the way people speak now. She is, in other words, a star, and her wonderful book already feels to me like a classic.

Isabel Greenberg will be appearing at the Lakes international comic art festival in Kendal, 18-20 October