A mortally funny story of a mother's love that defies all odds, including death
'Amie Barrodale is the most important writer of my generation' OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
Three days after I died, my son ran away.
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth in the North American desert.
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.
'An extraordinary novel' AKHIL SHARMA
'I've read nothing like it' CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN
'As absurd, tender and moving as life itself' BookPage
About the Author
Amie Barrodale is the author of the short story collection You Are Having a Good Time. She received the Plimpton Prize in 2012. A teaching-writing fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she received the Maytag Fellowship from them in 2014. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review and other publications. She is a former staff writer for The Onion and a former Fiction Editor at Vice.
Industry Reviews
Raw and funny, yet graceful and astonishingly precise, Trip is a book with the power to resonate in the most intimate ways for any reader. I read it in awe, as if Barrodale had written it just for me
Ottessa Moshfegh
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
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
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
Such a fun, surprising and interesting novel. I was captivated and charmed for its entirety; by the absurd humour at the death conference, by the main character's scenes in the bardo – the crazy sexual interlude when she borrows the body of a dental patient on nitrous especially. I was moved, too, by Barrodale's rendering of the complex emotions that come with a parent’s inevitable loss of control.
Adelaide Faith
Beautifully crafted, hard-boiled fun. Trip is a good time
Nell Zink
Brilliantly strange, funny and moving
New Yorker
What a brilliant, funny, beautiful, f*cked-up, heart-smashing novel
Sam Lipsyte
Phenomenal and unpredictable, Trip is like nothing else I've read in a long time. I was hooked from the beginning and on the edge of my seat throughout. I loved this incredible novel
Ana Kinsella
