Hello. And pleasure to meet you. My name Yevgeny. Yevgeny, yes. But my friends they call me Zhenya. Now, where was I born? In Vitebsk.

In the looking glass world of the old Soviet reality, the future is certain. But the past is unpredictable and the truth a negotiable commodity.

Into this changeable environment comes young Zhenya Gorevich, struggling to embrace a supposed Communist utopia. When his mother confesses the unlikely secret of his parentage, he determines to escape Russia and find his long-lost father. On a pillock's progress, as trying as anything endured by Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, the hapless Gorevich journeys from his dreary home town of Vitebsk to Moscow and, eventually, to swinging London and the 1966 World Cup in an effort to reclaim his birthright.

Culminating with the 1966 World Cup in England, Martin Sixsmith delightfully combines the riotous tradition of Russian satire with his own wry humour in the story of one man's circuitous journey through life.