Wow, what a unique and enjoyable book. Tons of brilliant characters, and lots of smart humor. For a good 1/4 of the book I couldn’t even figure out who’s who and what the basic plot was, but it was engaging and well-written nonetheless. 

Gonna throw out a spoiler tag here, since I think part of the fun in that first bit was trying to wrap my head around what in the world was going on.

<SPOILER TIME!!!!!!!!!>

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Ok, so there’s a child prodigy in London (who might be named David, or maybe Steve, but his single mom Sibylla just calls him Ludo) who reads Greek at age 4 and learns a ton of languages and many other things. Both Ludo and his mom are a little on the autistic side, I think. But high functioning, and both very smart. At age 11, Ludo becomes curious about who his father is, but Sibylla is reluctant to tell him anything. After some detective work (Ludo is a very independent child in both education and in practicality; he gets around on the tube just fine by himself), Ludo discovers his father but is kind of disappointed with how ordinary he seems.

So, taking a cue from their favorite film (Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”) Ludo embarks on a quest to find a better father figure. In the movie, the head samurai recruits others by luring them into a hut and having an accomplice bash them with a stick as they enter the doorway, because “a good samurai will parry the blow.” The blow Ludo devises for all the interesting characters he meets is to claim that he is their son, and see what the reaction is. Kinda screwy, but I took it to mean that we can find fascinating examples of lives to be lived if we try; we need not be constrained by our family history or upbringing.

The Seven Samurai:

1. the real father. A washed up travel writer, full of himself but ignorant of how little he knows. Sibylla only went home with him that one night because she felt it would be impolite if she didn’t.
2. chess champion turned explorer. Very smart and accomplished, but pretty rude and unkind.
3. charismatic astronomer/science popularizer. Taught an Amazonian boy mathematics from scratch when his plane wrecked in jungle.
4. psycho artist obsessed with color and blood.
5. a gambler and bridge player, the coolest cucumber of the lot.  Raoul Wallenberg type to Guatemalans, but without being a real diplomat. 
   • A good gambler must know what his opponent believes (and, it goes without saying, uses it against them)
6. war journalist with PTSD who can’t live with what he’s seen people do to other people (clubbing babies to death with rifle butts…)
   • nearly a pro-suicide piece, echoing back to some of Sibylla’s comments earlier in the book. Probably the “best human” of the bunch, but regardless it is unfair of others to force someone in pain to deal with it indefinitely.
7. Japanese pianist famous for long eccentric concerts with drums 

Some quotes I liked:

On piano concerts: “there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes…if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.”

On piano playing: “The Konigsbergs all despised the piano, there it was all the notes conveniently divided up into a keyboard you went away and when you came back there it was the notes all still attached to the keys just where you left them, how boring, a child of four could play it (they all had). They also hated sight reading, & it is a tiresome feature of piano music that (since 10 or more notes may be played simultaneously) it involves anything up to 10 times the amount of sight reading of any other instrument. It was an instrument no Konigsberg would play if someone smaller could be made to play it instead, & since my mother was the youngest she never got the chance to hand it over to someone else.”

On the struggles of funding for science (from Samurai #3): “It’s not just that the people who write the cheques don’t like science. They are elected by people who don’t like science. They are reported by papers edited by innumerate middlebrows who are prepared to read the odd snippet about dinosaurs. … What you’ve got to understand is that you simply can’t afford to act as if you were dealing with adults. You’re not dealing with people who want to understand how something actually happens to work. You’re dealing with people who would like you to rekindle a childlike sense of wonder.”

On why some formal education is nice to have: “Any idiot can learn a language, all you have to do is keep going and sooner or later it all makes sense, but with mathematics you have to understand one thing to understand another, and you can’t always tell what the first thing is that you have to understand. And even then either you see it or you don’t. You can waste a lot of time trying to work out what you need to know [emphasis added], and a lot more time just trying to see it.”

On finding fathers: “I thought that I was beginning to get the hang of this. I had started by picking the wrong kind of father, but now I knew what to look for I could build up a collection of 20 or so. I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I’d spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer.”

Published July 15, 2026July 17, 2026