Thirty years ago I was dispatched by a children's books magazine to interview Russell Hoban. The afternoon I spent with him talking about books, writing and life  the interview was supposed to last an hour, and I stayed for six  has remained with me ever since. It was an experience of surpassing strangeness, and one which left me changed. Just like reading one of his books, in fact.

Being a diligent reviewer, when I knew I'd be writing this piece I dug out my ancient copies of his books  The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Riddley Walker, The Mouse and his Child, the Frances stories I read to my children. I also trawled the tributes and obituaries published after he died late last year, and that word "strangeness" cropped up in most. One commentator went so far as to describe him as "the strangest writer in Britain", which is pretty good-going for a country that has produced JG Ballard and Mervyn Peake.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, that Hoban long ago acquired cult status, strangeness often being the main qualification. But Will Self has said that he found Hoban in person to be "wry, gentle and wise", and those are the very words I'd use to describe his second-to-last book Soonchild (a picture book is due out from Walker in the autumn, and the RSC is staging a play based on The Mouse and His Child). Mind you, it's pretty strange too.

The story is set in "The North", a place which might, or might not, bear some similarity to the regions where the Inuit live. Its hero is Sixteen-Face John, a shaman who neglects his spiritual duties and spends his time drinking Coke and reading the kind of magazines that have centrefolds. John's wife is pregnant, but the baby  the brilliantly named "Soonchild" of the title  refuses to emerge from the womb because it can't hear the "World Songs", the music that tempts all children to be born. So John has to set out on a quest to put things right.

Such a bald description of the plot does little to convey the story's timeless quality. Ignore the references to Coke and magazines, and you could be reading an Inuit legend, shot full of wryness and wit and with deep insight into human nature. Like all of us, John is full of fears and anxieties, and acquired his name because he had "sixteen different faces for looking at what scared him". The passage in which these are listed in order of escalation is a virtuoso piece of comic writing.

Walker are also to be congratulated on producing such a beautiful physical object, with a fine dustjacket, fully illustrated boards and different coloured paper to represent different parts of the narrative, and all for under a tenner. Alexis Deacon's moody pencil illustrations add a haunting counterpoint to the magical realism of the story, and have their own moments of wit.

One question looms large, of course: is it a children's book? The themes  birth, death, spiritual regeneration  might lead you to think otherwise, but that would be a mistake. Hoban himself said several times that all his work is about looking at the world and finding it strange. That's what children and young people do, and what the best books do for them. Every adolescent should have a copy of this one. Trust me, nobody will be writing stories quite like this any more.

 Tony Bradman's Sam and Ruby's Olympic Adventure is published by Barrington Stoke.