Trip
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
One of New York Times's Notable Books of the Year
One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads
A woman embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to help her son, who is literally and figuratively lost at sea: a hilarious and deeply moving voyage of the body and the mind.
Sandra dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal attended by academics and mystics. Days later, back in America, her teenage son, Trip, runs away with a man who picks him up on the side of a road. Sandra tries to get a message back to Trip through the mystics, but the mystics are distracted, and her son and the strange man set out to sea.
Amie Barrodale’s first novel features restless souls, Buddhist deities, divorcees in recovery programs, arguing academics, uncomprehending school principals, and treatment centers for troubled teenagers. It journeys from body to body, through life and death and back again. It tells the story of a mother and son who find other people hard to understand and who are themselves misunderstood. Guiding this wild, unpredictable journey is deep devotion: the desire to save a child and to be a good mother despite it all.
Wide-eyed with wonder, blazingly funny and achingly moving, Trip brings us the deeper meaning of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: the past is a memory, the future is a projection, the present is gone before we can see it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The wild and quirky debut novel from Barrodale (You Are Having a Good Time, a story collection) ranges across two continents and the afterlife to tell the story of a mother and son's failure to connect. Sandra, a career-driven PBS correspondent, arranges with her ex-husband to place their autistic 15-year-old son, Trip, in a treatment center before flying to Nepal to cover a conference on dying. There, Sandra dies from a freak accident and is guided into a Tibetan Buddhist version of the afterlife by one of the conference attendees, who reads out loud from a religious text on his phone ("Do not be attached to your surroundings. Instead, look forward to a greater endeavor"). Meanwhile, Trip has run away from the treatment center and, while hitchhiking, is picked up by an unstable man named Anthony, who drives them to a party on a hurricane-stricken island off the coast of Georgia. After the pair get into a misadventure involving a stolen boat, Sandra desperately attempts to enter another body in order to save Trip. The story lines never quite converge, beyond providing a frame for Sandra to contend with her regret over neglecting Trip. Still, Trip's adventure story is great fun, and Barrodale's depiction of the afterlife is amusing and wonderfully surreal. It's a hoot.
