Twelve years ago after its first publication Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot arrived in the UK by popular demand. Inspector Cabillot, the first Europanto detective, tackles varied European concerns such as a mad cow disease terrorist cell that takes over London and the kidnapping of a major European Union leader by Finnish nationalists who want to replace Europanto with Finnish as the only language of the European Union. These stories take a light-hearted look at the European Union and its problems in a language created to give Europeans a common tongue.

The linguistic recipe used by Diego Marani is broadly the following; take a firm grounding of English and French, toss in chunks of German, Spanish and Italian; garnish with a dash of Flemish and Euroslang; pour the contents into a language liquidiser and serve when thoroughly pureed. Ben MacIntyre in The Times AUTHOR: Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He works as a senior linguist for the European Union in Brussels. Every week he writes a column for a Swiss newspaper about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus. In Italian he has published six novels, including the highly acclaimed New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs.