When two Hungarian Jewish refugees landed by accident in Britain in the winter of 1956, they had little idea what the future would hold. But they carried with them the traces of their turbulent past, just enough to provide the clues to their past.

Resurrecting 200 years of wars and revolutions, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire via two totalitarianisms to contemporary Britain, and through the remnants of family possessions and old memories, Nick Barlay retraces the footsteps of the vanished. There is the death march of a grandfather, the military manoeuvres of a great uncle, the final weeks and moments of a great grandmother deported to Auschwitz, two boys survival of an untold massacre and codenamed spies operating in Cold War Britain. Scattered Ghosts is the poignant, powerful story of an all but disappeared world, told through the extraordinary experiences of a single family ruptured by great forces and occasionally brought together by cherry strudel.