A darkly hilarious tale of a model family's disintegration. Professor Siem Sigerius - maths genius, jazz lover, judo champion, Renaissance man. When Aaron meets his girlfriend Joni's family for the first time, her multitalented father could hardly be a more intimidating figure, but somehow the underachieving photographer manages to bluff his way to a friendship with the paterfamilias. With his feet under the table at the beautiful Sigerius farmhouse, Aaron feels part of the family. A perfect family. Until, that is, things start to go wrong in a very big way. A cataclysmic explosion in a firework factory, the advent of internet pornography, the reappearance of a forgotten murderer and a jet-black wig-all play a role in the spectacular fragmentation of the Sigerius clan... and of Aaron's fragile psyche. "Great European art: the Dutchman Peter Buwalda explodes the bourgeois family saga. The narrative pyrotechnics alone are a tour de force." Die Zeit "Peter Buwalda's impressive family saga is a genuine page-turner, with a forceful, precise style. The author races with unstoppable speed towards the finish, without getting entangled in the numerous gripping narrative strands, without even steering out of the curve." Libris-Prize Jury Report, 2011 "Buwalda's debut novel [is] daring in its linguistic power and freedom, and impressive, even frightening, in its psychological sharpness and precision ... great and outrageous." Frankfurter Rundschau
