It is about the child Jonas, and his path to writing and adulthood, with autobiographical similarities to the author of the novel we read.

But he is both the narrator, and one of the characters. A major theme in the Khemiri world is people's complicated inner lives, so this becomes a realistic depiction of how literature mimics reality – we both live and read in different levels of fiction.

The story follows Jonas' ties to the three sisters Mikkola, half-Tunisians and neighbors in Drakensberg in Stockholm – part of the million program in the inner city: not street, not Swedish middle class. Both. Neither.

It takes place over 35 years, divided into seven books that go on ever faster. Like a creation story, a literary hourglass.

And an examination of life's big questions: the young "what should I do with my life?", the equally difficult as middle age shouts: "is this all?" and the one who comes next: "what did I do with my life?"

The questions roar like obsessions in the skull and echo like the supernatural curse that is the riddle and struggle of the novel: "everything that you love you will lose".

It is a novel written in the spirit of Paul Auster, the postmodern 80s writer that Khemiri writes in early New York. A tribute and an epic play of over 700 pages. A little too many, I think on a straight line with humorous wedding scenes, but in other hairpin curves and elevator chess they feel like a gift.

One of the finest things about Khemiri is his style, the sense of where a person speaks from, marinated in time. The language as our touch ID action that can never be copied, but gives access. Perhaps his strongest card is the naïve tone. Rules are "bendable" and at Östermalm in Stockholm there are "pedigree dogs". The words become tactile, like small bodies to touch.

The political, such as the Kafkaesque nature of an accusatory society to which we are, at worst, on the doorstep, is present, as roots through time. But Khemiri writes contemporary disasters (as if the novel was finished yesterday!) but never triggers them exactly as in real life.

This is how a magical realist works with surface tension.