A rambunctious, tragicomic absurd road trip novel about a wealthy Swiss-German mother and son
Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka.Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.
Long-listed for Man Booker International Award 2025 (UK)
'Praise for Christian Kracht:
Whether he's fictionalizing history in order to question the validity of history, or fictionalizing himself in order to question the validity of self, it is by now apparent to me and to his many readers that Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation.' - Joshua Cohen
'Christian Kracht is a master of the well-formed sentence, the elegance of which conceals horror. His novels involve Germany, ghosts, war and madness, and every conceivable fright, but they are also full of melancholy comedy, and they all hide a secret that one never quite fathoms.' - Daniel Kehlmann
'Imperium is astonishing and captivating, a tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time.' - Karl Ove Knausgaard
'The Dead is a story of love and sadness in times when the weak were broken by the unforgiving ideologies of fascism and National Socialism . . . I read The Dead twice in a row, first for the story and then for the beauty of the prose.' - Sjon
'To say a word about Christian Kracht's Imperium would be like engraving Goethe's Conversations of German Refugees into an orange seed. Or perhaps into a coconut? ... An adventure novel. No doubt. That there even is still such a thing' - Elfriede Jelinek
Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose work has been translated into thirty languages. His novels include Faserland, 1979, Imperium - which was the recipient of the Wilhelm Raabe literature prize, and one of Publisher's Weekly ten best books of 2015 - and, most recently, The Dead, which won the Swiss Book Prize and the Hermann Hesse Award.
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