Trip
‘The most important writer of my generation' Ottessa Moshfegh
-
- € 12,99
Beschrijving uitgever
A mortally funny story of a mother's quest to save her son against all odds
'Transcendent and dazzlingly weird' New York Times
'Beautifully crafted, hard-boiled fun' Nell Zink
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world in a desert in New Mexico, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth.
But Sandra soon discovers that a mother’s work is never done, not even when you’re dead. When Trip is picked up on the side of the road by a strange man, Sandra is the only one who knows where he is.
As Trip ventures further south towards the coast and directly into the eye of a hurricane, Sandra’s struggle to save him from the other realm begins.
From Florida’s Gulf Stream to the raging seas, through Munich-bound aeroplanes and from one body to another, Trip takes us on an absurd, profound and irresistibly entertaining odyssey - a story of childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between.
'Brilliantly strange, funny and moving' New Yorker
'I was captivated and charmed for its entirety' Adelaide Faith
'Ultimately a story of her mother's love for her unique offspring' Daily Mail
'An extraordinary novel' Akhil Sharma
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.
