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A mother embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to save her son who is literally and figuratively lost at sea: a hilarious, gut-wrenching debut novel.
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a treatment center in the American desert.
Trip is not sure where to go next―but a strange man picks him up on the side of a road. As Sandra roves through the past and present in her state of limbo, Trip and his new companion, Anthony, venture farther south toward the coast, directly into a hurricane. When Sandra learns what has happened to her son, her struggle to help him from the other realm begins.
Amie Barrodale's gripping dual odyssey of mother and son takes us from Florida's Gulf Stream to the raging seas, on Munich-bound airplanes, from body to body. It's about childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between. 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.
"A maternal meditation on life and death that can't quite live up to its cosmic ambitions." —Kirkus Reviews
"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." —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
"Amie Barrodale's Trip is an extraordinary novel. It is as if Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson have joined together to write a tender story of a recently dead mom who wanders the bardo but is always drawn back to her imperiled son, an autistic teenager who is on a boat with a stranger, lost at sea." ―Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life
"Trip is an extraordinary novel. I've read nothing like it. It is crazy, wise, sensitive, funny, and terrifying―all those things put together so fluidly you can't pick one apart from the other. Like all the best physical, chemical, emotional, and existential trips I've taken, this one blows the mind and shocks the heart." ―Christopher Bollen, author of Havoc
This information about Trip was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amie Barrodale's stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, and other publications. In 2012 she was awarded The Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story "William Wei." She is the author of You Are Having a Good Time: Stories.
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