Sharp, probing and morbidly funny, the book is a fictional retelling of the life of surrealist Austrian film director G W Pabst. Faced with relative anonymity in Hollywood, Pabst returned to Austria in 1939 to visit his ailing mother and was forced to produce films under the Nazi regime. Unfolding at an exhilarating speed, the plot widens into fraught questions of complicity and power.