Eurotrash

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka.
Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose work has been translated into thirty languages. His novels include Faserland, 1979, Imperium - which was the recipient of the Wilhelm Raabe literature prize, and one of Publisher's Weekly ten best books of 2015 - and, most recently, The Dead, which won the Swiss Book Prize and the Hermann Hesse Award.