This novel follows the lives of a conservative, Swedish minister, Pontus Franzon, and his pretty young wife, Maria, through their years in a parsonage in Lapland, their eight children, and their journey to a new life in America.

    It covers sourcing, building, testing and then setting off in the amphibious jeep from North America across the Atlantic to the western Sahara, before driving it up to England and undertaking a protracted rebuild.

    From the commonplace charm of the title story, to the searing futuristic satire of "The Children's Campaign, " to the disquieting fantasy of "The Lift That Went Down to Hell, " we see that Lagerkvist admits no settled boundaries between fact and fable. In this he is a poet for whom fantasy permeates the actual and "reality" can take on the dimensions of the fabulous. Life is, to him, a system of dark paradoxes; but there is also the good -- "a quiet, everyday radiance that mankind always had difficulty noticing and setting a value on."