Off-beat, irreverent and subversive – a Jewish family memoir about convenient delusions and unsayable truths, from the acclaimed author of the cult classic novel, Submarine 'The best book I’ve read in the past year . . . A masterpiece' Financial Times ‘A slippery marvel [and] a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness’ Observer ‘Poignant and profound, comic and unconventional – and genuinely, searingly meaningful’ The New York Times Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told
