Overstaying

An isolated woman clashes with an enigmatic visitor in this funny, jagged parable about integration, difference and hospitalityAn isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as 'the visitor'. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, and the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, and she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders and regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman's fantasies of power and control grow ever wilder.Sly, wilful and full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound and uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration and the stranger within all of us.

Ariane Koch, born in Basel in 1988, studied fine arts and interdisciplinarity. In addition to novels, she writes theatre and performance texts. Her work has won numerous awards and been performed in places like Basel, Berlin, Cairo, Istanbul and Moscow. Overstaying, her debut novel, won the Swiss Literature Award and the Aspekte Prize for Literature, and is being translated into eight languages.Damion Searls has translated more than fifty books of classic modern literature, including works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Elfriede Jelinek and Jon Fosse. His own writing includes fiction, poetry, criticism, The Inkblots and The Philosophy of Translation, forthcoming.