Joe Dunthorne's great-grandfather was a family legend- the eccentric pre-war inventor of radioactive toothpaste and the Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home.

Joe always knew he would write a book about this one day. The only problem was that the old man had already written the book of his life - an unpublished memoir so dense and rambling that none of his living descendants had attempted to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally cracked open the manuscript, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew...