Yes. I can feel it in my whole body. A great thrill – as if an adventure has begun.

As if I’m the boy in a book about a boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land. Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father.

And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or thieves, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave.