For James Jeffrey, his mother’s homeland of Hungary has always featured in family stories – sometimes as a fairytale land, other times as an exotic parallel universe. It is a place where storks build nests as large as tables on chimney tops and grandparents live in suburbs called Uranium Town. People say ‘hello’ when they mean ‘goodbye’, have no word for ‘he’ or ‘she’, and bestow an almost godlike status on cakes and lard.

It is the country where James’s mother, a volatile divorcee who could outflirt Zsa Zsa Gabor, and his father, a coal miner from a particularly sensible part of England, began an unlikely romance that lasted until the other end of the earth.

With his wife, children and still-warring parents in tow, James decided that the time had come to go back to Hungary. Their journey into the little-known paprika paradise is hilarious, thought-provoking and completely unpredictable.

‘Joyous, illuminating and enchanting’ Herald Sun