Sofka Zinovieff’s third novel, Stealing Dad, explores ‘the madness of grief’ through the eyes of seven siblings. Due to the multiple marriages and reckless sexual adventures of their infamous artist father, Alekos Skyloyiannis, they grew up separated by geography; his sudden death has brought them all together for the first time. When his widow, Heather, reveals that Alekos did not want a funeral, the disparate siblings take matters into their own hands and steal the coffin.

Without ritual, says Zinovieff, grief is chaotic. Throughout the novel, the siblings desperately scrabble for ceremony. Alekos’s second daughter, Iris, is temporarily soothed by the prayers of the Greek Orthodox priest they invite for an impromptu blessing, his words ‘imbued with power through centuries of repetition’. Zinovieff – whose own experience of being barred from attending her father’s funeral inspired the novel – contextualises grief’s most ugly, rash, contradictory and humiliating expressions with compassion and humour. Heather, defiant, grieves alone. She finds the ‘meagre crumbs of comfort thrown in the face of such titanic tragedy’, embodied in her mother’s fussing, insufferable. Iris impulsively sleeps with her ex-boyfriend and dreads returning to Athens, fearing that her friends will ‘smother her with sympathy’. At one point she tries making Indigo, the eldest brother, laugh to ‘show him she could still be buoyant within the misery’. Dora, archetypal eldest child, bawls at the Scottish beach to which the siblings abscond with their father’s body, ‘I want my Babbas!’ 

Zinovieff occasionally resorts to telling us how characters feel pages after showing us. Indigo, who is, conveniently, an anthropologist (as is Zinovieff), declares with the subtlety of a textbook: ‘A funeral is a universal human need … every society has a system for what to do after a death. Always