If you could have any magical power, what would it be? In discussing this question with a class, H.G. Parry came up with the perfect power for an English major: bringing characters (or even objects) out of a book and into the real world. “We were talking about literary theory and how maybe if you brought them out you could bring out your own particular interpretation,” she says. So if different people brought the same character out of a book each version would look completely different.

That idea developed into Parry’s debut novel, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. Narrator Rob is perfectly content with his ordinary life in Wellington, but his unexciting existence is upended when his brother Charlie returns from abroad. Charlie can read characters into existence when he concentrates closely on a text. Unfortunately, he’s an English professor, so this ends up happening rather a lot—but the trouble doesn’t really start until someone else starts summoning fictional characters and sending them out into the world.

Parry has a Ph.D in English literature and her love of the subject animates the book. Even writers often underrate the power and excitement of literary analysis, not to mention how profoundly it shapes every readers’ experience of a story. “There's a meaning that's been encoded into the book, but there's also a whole other decoding done by the reader,” she says. “They take and construct what they see there…but also what they want to be there and what they need to be there.”

This view of literature is an admittedly postmodern one, which makes for a surprising contrast with the mostly Victorian novels that Parry was inspired by. Writers like Charles Dickens adopted an omnipotent perspective in their books, laying out exactly what was happening and why. But, Parry points out, “that's not what happens when you give it to a reader. They fall in love with particular characters and want to know what happens to them. They identify with particular things. They love particular strains. They reject particular things they're being given and rewrite it.” The way a story is intended is not necessarily the way it’s received.

That expansiveness is particularly characteristic of Dickens and made him an ideal source of characters for Parry’s novel. “Dickens has a lot of scope to work your way into,” she says. “He's got a world that has a lot of nooks and crannies, and people pop up out of nowhere and then go away again.” Dickens also put a lot of emphasis on the affects of childhood trauma, which proves central to the troubled relationship between Charlie and Rob.

Rob is an unusual protagonist for a fantasy novel: He’s a successful lawyer with a supportive and loving girlfriend. In other words, he pretty much has it together. Charlie, on the other hand, is brilliant but scattered, prone to working at all hours of the night and accidentally leaving his phone in the refrigerator. Those differences breed misunderstandings, which are then rewritten as facts—much in the same way we reinterpret fictional characters. “Especially with family members who we think we know really well,” Parry says, “we can sometimes read them the way we want to read them rather than the way they need to be read or the way they are.”

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep is all about the joy and power of reading. “I wanted to write a book that was sort of a love letter just to books in general,” Parry says, “partly to literary analysis, but I guess just to reading in all shapes and forms.”

Alex Heimbach is a writer and editor in California.