To celebrate Picador's fortieth birthday, their authors were asked to contribute a piece of writing on the (impossible) theme of 'Forty'.  I spent weeks wondering what on earth to write about, before realising that my forthcoming novel, ALMOST ENGLISH, was inspired partly by the fact that, although my grandparents spoke Hungarian, I only ever acquired forty words of the language.  What's more, they weren't Hungarian.  This is what I wrote:

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