A wild road-trip with your father's corpse? It's quite the story

Telegraph

17-05-2025

When Sofka Zinovieff's beloved father died in 2021, she and her five siblings were told that they weren't allowed to attend his funeral. It was his and his fourth wife's wish that only the latter should be there.
Zinovieff, a British novelist and journalist, did not proceed to steal her father's body from a funeral home and abscond with it to a remote Scottish island in order to carry out her own last rites. But her sadness did lead her to write a work of fiction in which, when the impetuous and irascible artist Alekos Skyloyiannis keels over one day and falls into Regent's Canal, and his straitlaced sixth wife Heather informs his many children that there will be no funeral, they decide to take matters into their own hands.
If that scenario – nicking your dead dad's body and embarking on a wild goose chase across the country with a motley crew of half siblings – sounds like an absolute farce: well, sort of. The late Alekos is a farcical character: a successful but controversial Greek sculptor, fond of women and wine with seven children by five mothers, six marriages under his belt and a trail of emotional devastation in his wake.
Each of his children have been irrevocably shaped by their father, or his absence: Dora, the eldest, has cleaved to family, started a nursery school and gone full 'Greek mother'; her sister Iris, also a sculptor, has been unable to hold down her own successful relationship; Indigo, the gay eldest son, 'never knew if I was trying to escape him or get closer'; Parisian Esme, whose mother never married Alekos, is unencumbered by his Greek surname but is similarly unencumbered by life; Kali and Zach, the glamorous, Indian-Greek-American twins have carved their own path and Willow, the 19-year-old youngest has only just discovered who her father was.
Only now, after his death, do the siblings all meet together for the first time. 'With their different mothers, various households and distinctive upbringings, there was only one factor that made them a family and that person no longer existed. How could they ever unpick the physical and emotional tangle of these seven people whose one link to each other was Alekos?'
That's exactly what Stealing Dad does: unpick the tangle, smooth it out and recraft it. As the siblings embark on this mad adventure, fuelled by grief, rage and a desire to emulate the sort of caper their father would have loved, they not only work through the problems of how to deal with death and grieving in a state where there are no fixed rituals, but they become a new sort of unit. Iris, for instance, realises that her half siblings 'expanded [her] sense of herself… she had three other sisters and two brothers, and they could make their own connections, be their own family.'
That makes the book sound trite, but it isn't. It's funny, sad and beautifully written. It will make you appreciate your own family, and wish, perhaps, that you too had an assortment of semi siblings with whom you could take some magic mushrooms, filch a corpse and go on an adventure. And if you think your stepmother is bad, just wait until you meet Heather.