Once I had seven fathers in seven years. This is the story of those years.

Christmas, 1983. In the woods outside Norrköping, a house is shaken by a violent argument – and in the aftermath, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret.

The secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. The real one has shoulder length hair and lives in a land far, far away. It’s the best thing Andrev has ever heard. He feels like he’s the boy in a book, a book about a boy whose father is the king of a magical land, with genies who can take him there. But there will be no spirits in Andrev’s story. Only new fathers, who are not his.

This is a novel about growing up in the chaos of social change; about mothers who mutter about ‘bloody men’ while they smoke under the hood of the cooker; about how love begins and ends; and above all, about men. Because after all, you learn an awful lot about this strange species when you have seven fathers in seven years.