Ben Sherwood sits upstairs in the cafe of Waterstones bookshop sipping iced coffee and looking like a kid on the threshold of his best Christmas ever. As well he might.

Down below, the rolling pedestrian ribbon that is the lunchtime traffic of Oxford weaves its way up George Street. It's a fitting backdrop for this 36-year-old Californian-born author, whose first comic novel, The Man Who Ate The 747, has just been published to the sort of reviews for which writers would happily spend years starving in garrets.

And as an added plus, he's back in his beloved Oxford to promote it.

Having obtained a degree from Harvard, Sherwood spent three years as a postgraduate student at Magdalen, where he read history.

"They were," he says simply, "the happiest three years of my life. I love this town." At Magdalen, he rowed, played rugby and spent almost all of his stipend on books from Blackwell's.

His debut novel is a quirky tale of a man in small town America who decides to eat a Boeing 747 to prove his love for the woman who has occupied his dreams since she was the only guest who turned up to his tenth birthday party. One reviewer in the States was so impressed, she went so far as to describe Sherwood as a modern-day Mark Twain.

Now those who bask in the warmth of this kind of critical acclaim can also find themselves being badly burned by it.

One thinks immediately of the critic Jon Landau who, in a well-meaning fit of admiration, hung a millstone round a certain rock star's neck one night when he wrote: "I have seen rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Sherwood smiles ruefully when you ask him about the Twain quote. "I remember when it came over the fax, I had three feelings," he reveals. "They were feelings of mortification - being compared to Mark Twain; overwhelming fear - how could I live up to this? And sheer exhilaration - what a compliment.

"Twain was a great hero of mine and here was great goal to live up to - but if I could come within a distant fraction of his work, I'd be happy."

Sherwood, a senior broadcast producer with NBC News in New York, grew up in Los Angeles, where he was an avid reader of the Guinness Book of Records.

Men who were almost 9ft tall, or so fat that they had to be buried in coffins the size of piano cases, or who enjoyed pogoing up Mount Fiji, were all his imaginary childhood friends.

And when he met a man who had actually eaten a Cessna light aircraft - "he told me that with the proper French sauce, the overhead bins were delicious" - the seeds of his novel began to germinate. He decided to set it in Superior, Nebrasaka, a small town exactly in the centre of the United States.

Sherwood spent two years visiting the place and being eyed suspiciously by the locals. "Are you from the government? Are you a tax collector?" they'd demand.

"It took them two years before they accepted I wasn't after their money," Sherwood grins. "But the book really isn't about a man eating a plane - it's about proving your love and I hope that the reader feels that the heart of the story is real and true. When I was at Oxford, I used to spend all my money at Blackwell's bookshop, but I never thought that I'd write a novel.

"When Picador pre-empted the competition to publish the novel, I had only one stipulation - that I could come to Oxford to sign copies of it. I've been looking forward to this trip for a year."

Even if Ben Sherwood turns out to be never the (new) Twain, his stylish and warm humour should win him many converts. As one reviewer put it: "I laughed all the way through it and cried at the end. This is a sweet peach."

One suspects that Samuel Langhorne Clemens would have settled for that.