Kehlmann puts us deftly inside Tyll’s fretful mind. We’re shown his tough village boyhood as the son of an intellectually curious miller whose interest in infinity – “the fact that to every number you can add another, as if there were no God to stem such a tide” – spells doom when witch-hunting Jesuits turn up from England in the wake of the gunpowder plot. Kehlmann establishes Tyll as a flesh-and-blood figure by giving him tragic origins. Wikipedia wormholes await the reader unfamiliar with, say, the battle of Zusmarshausen, the poet Martin Opitz, or indeed the novel’s eponymous hero, lifted from a 16th-century folk tale about a lawless practical joker who roams the land exposing hypocrisy (Michael Rosen once adapted the story). Set in early 17th-century Europe, it takes place during the thirty years’ war, a sectarian power struggle over the Holy Roman Empire, which ravaged Germany and left millions dead. (His last book broke with the formula to follow a harassed screenwriter on holiday with his family it’s called You Should Have Left.) The creative travails of men, and the collateral damage they inflict, may not seem a surefire draw for book-buyers, yet Kehlmann, who writes in German, is translated into more than 40 languages – he’s fun to read, and his books travel light, uncluttered by cultural references. His sons grow into men who manifest their inexplicable loss - Martin becomes a priest who does not believe in God Ivan, a painter in constant artistic crisis Eric, a businessman given to hallucinations and a fear of ghosts - even as they struggle to understand their father's disappearance and make their own places in the world.T ime and again, Daniel Kehlmann’s novels feature an artist whose success depends on leaving his wife and children. In time, still absent from his family, he beings to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author.

Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis.

From the young, internationally acclaimed author of Measuring the World comes a stunning, tragicomic novel about three brothers, their relationship to their distant father, and their individual fates and struggles in the modern world.

F by Daniel Kehlmann