Two sisters travel through present-day Bulgaria, chauffeured by the forbearing Rumen Apostoloff. He wants to show them his country’s treasures, the pottery decorated with peacock eyes (whose cobalt blue is poisonous), the Black Sea coast (completely spoiled), the architecture (a crime of the 20th century). At first, Apostoloff’s attempts at mediation are not very successful. The sisters’ Bulgarian inheritance weighs heavily on them – when the father, the successful doctor and melancholic immigrant, appears in the narrator’s dreams, the rope he used to hang himself still trails behind him. In Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s waspish, very black and intensely comical new novel, a daughter settles old scores with her father and his country.