Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (author), Daniel James Bowles (translator)

A jaded journalist takes his spiky mother and her ill-gotten wealth on a road trip in this tragicomic and absurd novel

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, a middle-aged man embarks on a dubious road trip through Switzerland with his eighty-year-old mother, recently discharged from a mental institution.

Traversing the country in a hired cab, they attempt to give away the wealth she has amassed from investing in the arms industry, but a fortune of such immensity is surprisingly hard to squander. Haunted in different ways by the figure of her father, an ardent supporter of Nazism, mother and son can no longer avoid delving into the darkest truths about their past. Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning.

The pair's tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.

Praise for Christian Kracht: 'Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation' Joshua Cohen 'Astonishing and captivating' Karl Ove Knausgaard