When Carmen is only five, her father tells her he’s moving to Africa. And although she is genuinely upset, in truth she hardly knows him. All she’s known is a quicksilver figure who materializes for weekend visits, then vanishes for months on end. And even when he is present, Carmen must share him with unseen, anonymous girlfriends.

By nine, Carmen is old enough to make yearly journeys to whatever exotic locale her father calls home. Each trip is emotionally charged—a kaleidoscope of new places, new people, new experiences. But at its vibrant, blinding centre is always one enigmatic figure: her father, Alfred. Proud, unapologetic, misogynistic, he is nonetheless a man of enormous charisma, power and mystery to his daughter.

For Alfred, his daughter’s visits are full of promise yet destined to wound. Why does she always choose to side with his enemies? Why are all the women in his life, especially his daughter, so subversive? Life is a battlefield—this he accepts—but he has always hoped that with Carmen it might be different.

When Alfred moves to strife-ridden Argentina in 1976, Carmen, now in her twenties, is outraged by his alignment with the military and the powerbrokers. His breezy condoning of torture and murder is even more unfathomable when she contemplates the horrors of his childhood in wartime Ger- many. Yet even while she battles him, she enjoys the oasis he has found in Buenos Aires. She cannot resist the unabashedly sensual, hedonistic life he has created, the adventurous and unpredictable vitality of the world he calls his own.

As father and daughter separate, only to collide anew, they struggle to find connections and to piece together life’s disparate threads of passion, love, sex and violence.

Germany, 1938

A seven-year-old boy sat on a roof feeling momentarily safe. He was skinny, all knees and elbows, and his short brown hair smelled like woodsmoke, dirt and sweat. His grey-green eyes were like a stream running over limestone—fresh, lively and cool.

A bird flew by in front of him. He pressed his bottom more firmly against the shingles. The roof was quite slanted and his worn shoes afforded only the slightest traction.

Mutti had gone to buy oxtails for the soup she always made when he was sick. His mother was like a nervous animal to him, a skittish horse. Or like a bird—flighty. He knew she loved him, yet when he ran through the house banging doors, or knocked his drink on the floor while turning to see something, her doting changed instantly to an explosive, nervous irritation.

She never let him play in the forest with the other boys or join Karl’s hiking club at the church. You might get lost or fall, she said. But young Alfred had boundless energy, so he found ways around her.

Today he really was sick; he felt tired and weak, but he almost never had the house to himself so he’d chosen one from the long list of forbidden activities—stealing biscuits and chocolate from the locked ration cupboard (he’d forged his own key). He had just relocked the cupboard when Karl, in the company of some other boys, had pounded on the front door calling his name.

Karl was tall, stocky, a year older than Alfred, unliked by adults and most of the children, but Alfred found him exciting to play with. Lately however, Karl had been demanding the plum bits of Alfred’s lunch and requisitioning his best tin soldiers.

Alfred was going to have to stand up to him and he was going to have to do it alone because, besides Karl, he had no friends. He’d probably take a beating and he was apprehensive—not of the pain so much as not knowing how much damage Karl would be able to inflict. He hoped he’d be able to hurt Karl enough to make the older boy choose someone else to pick on.

But not today. When they’d knocked, he’d stuffed the chocolate, biscuits and an empty tin into his rucksack and snuck out his own back door. He’d crept to where the steep street met the edge of his roof, and climbed up. Karl knocked again, muttered something and the boys drifted back down the hill, maybe to the river to throw stones.

Alfred carefully slipped the rucksack off his shoulders and took out its contents. He unwrapped the chocolate, put it in the tin, snapped the lid on and set it in the hot morning sun. The air smelled of warm pine needles.

From here he could see the Konditorei and Apotheke across the street, then all the roofs of the town sloping down into the valley, three church steeples rising from among them. Across the valley a chain of old mountains followed the river. The bird flew by and he felt momentarily off balance and dizzy.

He opened the tin. The chocolate had melted to the consistency of lava. He dipped a biscuit in and took a bite. The warm chocolate filled him with pleasure; the biscuit crunched pleasantly.

“Alfred!”

She stood, shopping cart at her side, looking up at him. He watched her irritation change to fear.

“Don’t move Liebchen! Eat your cookie. Stay still. I’ll be right back.”

She stepped under the eaves. He heard her fumble with the keys, a hint of hysteria in her self-whispering. He dipped the biscuit back in, took another bite, but the pleasure was diminished now that it wasn’t stolen and he felt annoyed with his mother for returning so soon.

Mutti came back into view but before she could speak, Alfred stood up to shake the crumbs from his lap and whooshed down the roof onto the flagstones.

Falling through the air felt just like his flying dreams.