Daniel Handler is better known to a generation of young readers as Lemony Snicket, author of the 13-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events. His latest novel for adults shares that twisted “what if?” view of the world; what if the ordinary business of family life were played out alongside the larger-than-life tropes of adventure stories?

Phil Needle is a radio producer in San Francisco on the threshold of a midlife crisis. His career and family life are unravelling in parallel. Gwen, his 14-year-old daughter, has been caught shoplifting. As a punishment, her mother makes her volunteer at a home for the elderly. Gwen is suffering her own existential crisis; slighted by the boy she loves and rejected by her bitchy friend, she finds a connection with Errol, a dementia patient at the home, who has a bookshelf full of seafaring tales and claims to have been a ship’s captain. In an act of rebellion, Gwen assembles a motley crew of misfits, including Errol and his Haitian nurse, Manny, and steals an ersatz pirate ship belonging to a travelling show in pursuit of adventure on the high seas.

The beauty of this book is in the way Handler wrongfoots the reader; a succession of sitcom-style mishaps suddenly gives way to an unexpectedly dark twist which takes the book into uncharted territory. He anatomises a particular modern malaise with a wry detachment that is pulled aside now and then to reveal moments of genuine tenderness. “This history is not a tragedy, despite its gore and its finale, and neither is it a comedy…” begins a late chapter. It is all of the above: a madcap, disturbingly funny novel that teeters on the edge of the surreal, even as it asks us to examine who and what we value.

We Are Pirates is published by Bloomsbury, £12.99. Click here to buy it for £9.99