Changes

|title=If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

|author=Andrew Nicoll

|publisher=Quercus

|date=April 2012

|summary=Based on the unbelievable claims of a real-life German Acrobat who claimed to have once been King of Albania, Nicoll imagines how this could have happened in a joyously farcical romp of a story, charmingly narrated.

}}

The story at the heart of Andrew Nicoll's ''If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead'' is bizarre but not entirely of Nicoll's own creation. It is narrated by German-born Otto Witte, who is rapidly recording a strange time in his life while Allied bombs are falling in World War Two Germany, although the events that he relates go back to 1913 when Otto was an acrobat working in a travelling circus currently in Buda, or perhaps Pest - he's not quite sure. In addition to his acrobatic skills, he is also blessed with an impressive set of whiskers which make him the dead ringer for the newly appointed Turkish King of Albania. If only he can get there before the claimant to the crown, perhaps he can steal the country and complete an unlikely rise in status. In the company of his pal, Max, a strongman, a blind mind-reader and his beautiful daughter, an exotic dancer and a purloined camel, what could possibly go wrong?