Once upon a time there was a sabre… When his grandfather dies, Samuel Livdweiss returns to his grandparents’ house. Everything seems normal but the sabre that had pride of place in the dining room has disappeared. Samuel decides to investigate this childhood memory with the help of his aunt Esther, a retired bookseller. It’s not so much the sabre with its curved blade itself that fascinates him, but the history it saw, the succession of men and wars. Which ancestor did it date back to? Who was the heroic – or, perhaps lawless – impostor VLRL (Victor Livdweiss Rex Livorum) who once ruled over a Baltic archipelago? A family myth endlessly reinvented by ageing uncles. A picaresque novel with shades of Raspe’s The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen and Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. It is a giddying quest that takes us right back to the Napoleonic wars and invites us on an outlandish journey in pursuit of pipedreams.