We can’t get into the house, so sitting in Paddy Mac’s car instead. He’s having a good look at the books that I did bring out – the Marx, the Dickens and those volumes from the Illustrated London News.

The Marx looks genuine enough. First-edition all right, same date, same basic text, same list of contents. My German’s non-existent, and Mac’s isn’t much better, so we can’t check any details of the text itself. But the oddity is that it’s published in London, not Hamburg, and it’s the wrong publisher anyway – in fact he’s never heard of them, and he’s a bit of a specialist in that period.

The Dickens? – yeah, he went seriously goggled-eyed at that. The right publisher this time, the right typography, the right paper, the right kind of binding. The writing-style exactly as for his other books of the time, with the same extravagant names for characters. The same illustrator as for his other books of that time, too. But it’s a story Mac has never heard of. And he’s pretty certain no-one else has ever heard of it, either.

It’s Dickens, definitely – and yet it just isn’t. For example, there’s barely a hint of the grime and poverty that fills so many of Dickens’ other stories. And some of the text is just plain weird – that’s the only word that fits. There was one page where the story was about a young girl who’d been trampled by something called a Wagon, “by all four of its legs down one side, as if its wood noticed her not at all”. Huh?

Everything about the book says it’s Dickens – but a Dickens in a world so weird that none of us would recognise it as ours.