Born in Stockport in 1959, Tibor Fischer is the son of two Hungarian basketball players who fled their homeland during the 1956 revolution; his 1992 Booker-nominated debut novel, Under the Frog, revisited this subject in wonderfully fleshy, blackly comic form. In 1993 Fischer was included in Granta's influential list of the 20 best young British writers, and in the ensuing two decades he has fulfilled that promise with a series of richly rewarding novels and short stories.