Alan sands the floors of a rambling house in a bohemian Toronto neighbourhood, shelves his secondhand books, and works hard at passing for a man with an ordinary past. His father is a mountain. His mother is a washing machine. Among his brothers is a set of Russian nesting dolls, and two of them turn up at his door close to starving.

Cory Doctorow's third novel keeps both halves of that sentence at the same volume. The city around Alan stays exact: students and layabouts in the house next door, cheap furniture, a young woman who admits under stress that she has wings, and that they grow back after every attempt to cut them off. Running beside the family folklore is a concrete piece of activism, a plan to blanket Toronto in free wireless internet, pushed by a technopunk who builds working hardware out of parts pulled from the city's dumpsters. Doctorow gives the network politics the same attention as the fairy tale.

The prose stays plain and fast. Doctorow never stops to systematise the magic into rules, and he treats Alan's impossible childhood the way you treat any family you cannot explain to strangers. Published in May 2005 and posted the same day as a free download under a Creative Commons licence, in formats down to plain ASCII, the book makes its copyright argument by existing.