Chased by bloodhounds on a German plain after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp, Askild is a painter, a murderer and a thief.

His son, Niels “Jug Ears” Junior, uses dynamite to blow up the privy when his father sells his cherished coin collection.

Grandson Asger fears dogs coming out of the walls, and can’t stop obsessing about the space under the stairs. He is haunted by the time he spent down there with his fat aunt. He has a confession to make and a buried treasure to find. But first he must plumb the depths of his shipwrecked family history. Unable to banish Doghead, a horror from his childhood, to the shadow realm, he reveals the very bad deeds children can do — to push his family story forward, past a point of no return.

Three generations of wild and dysfunctional Eriksson men are seen through layered and looping stories in a richly imaginative novel that has become a huge bestseller in Europe.