05 March 2025
We are over the moon that that Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles, has been longlisted for the prestigious International Booker Prize. The judges have said,
‘Eurotrash is the auto-fictional account of a writer contemplating his unpleasant and abusive childhood, his morally repugnant ancestry and his toxic financial inheritance as he drives his crotchety, alcoholic, senile mother through the landscape outside Zurich. This doesn’t sound like much fun! But this book is one of the most entertaining and ultimately moving stories we read. It is brilliantly, bitterly funny, even as it documents a vicious and tarnished emotional universe. This book is immaculately and wittily translated; on every page its sentences sparkle and surprise like guilty-legacy gold.’
We could not be prouder of this tragicomic novel and the way in which it has captivated readers. Congratulations to Christian, Daniel, and all the other longlisted authors and translators. The shortlist will be announced on 8th April.
Read more about Eurotrash below:
‘Odd and evocative, a frolicking rumination’ TIMES CRITICS’ BEST BOOK OF 2024
‘Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving’ FINANCIAL TIMES BEST TRANSLATED BOOK OF 2024
‘Resonant and spiky’ DAILY MAIL
‘Brilliantly caustic’ i PAPER
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.
