In 1705 Kornel Csillag's grandfather happens across a miraculous gold fob-watch gleaming in the mud of an ancient Magyar battlefield, which is to improve dramatically his family's shipwrecked fortunes - for the timepiece bestows an unexpected gift on succeeding generations of male Csillags: the gift of seeing. And each clairvoyant first-born son in turn passes down the Book of Fathers, a battered folio in which the family records its astonishing and revelatory visions and which takes in three hundred years of Csillag history, bearing vivid witness to holocaust and wedding feast alike.

Headlong, exuberant, riotous and packed tight with stories, jokes and tragedy, THE BOOK OF FATHERS is an irresistibly rich Central European feast of a book - parable, folk-tale and epic all rolled into one - that is set to become a European classic.