A mortally funny story of a mother's quest to save her son against all odds
'Transcendent and dazzlingly weird' New York Times
'Amie Barrodale is the most important writer of my generation' Ottessa Moshfegh
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. It turns out limbo is a great place from which to keep an eye on your errant son. 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.
'Beautifully crafted, hard-boiled fun' Nell Zink
'I was captivated and charmed for its entirety' Adelaide Faith
'An extraordinary novel' Akhil Sharma
"The wild and quirky debut novel from Barrodale ranges across two continents and the afterlife to tell the story of a mother and son’s failure to connect . . . Trip’s adventure story is great fun, and Barrodale’s depiction of the afterlife is amusing and wonderfully surreal. It’s a hoot" - Publishers Weekly
"Blending humor and Buddhism, Barrodale’s debut novel will resonate with fans of afterlife fiction" - Booklist
"A rather unstoppable read . . . Barrodale is incredibly skillful at evoking a wide range of emotions in a limited span of pages. Though dark, the novel is packed with wit and humor, and comes to a surprising conclusion that will especially satisfy parents who have attempted to impart a life lesson to a child. Trip is as absurd, tender and moving as life itself" - BookPage
"A transcendent and dazzling weird novel about disconnection and difference" - New York Times
"Hilarious and intelligent . . . Through the warmth and intensity of the mother-son bond in Trip, Amie Barrodale illustrates why it takes most of us thousands of lifetimes to let go" - Chicago Review of Books
"Much of the novel’s emotional heft comes from Barrodale’s portrait of Sandra as a mother trying, from beyond the veil, to resume the role she inhabited in life. Her memories of Trip—his innocent questions, his tiny rebellions, his larger eruptions of anger—are precisely drawn, and the neurodivergent child is rendered with loving clarity . . . Trip doesn’t tug its protagonist into the afterlife; it loops her back and back into the bewilderment of living" - Washington Post
"Brilliantly strange, funny and moving" - New Yorker