Trip: A Novel

by Amie Barrodale

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The past and present intersect with the dead and living in this existential voyage to the unknown. After her sudden death, Sandra must project from the beyond to reach her son in this hilarious, smart and moving debut novel from Amie Barrodale.

A woman embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to help her son, who is literally and figuratively lost at sea: a hilarious and deeply moving voyage of the body and the mind.

Sandra dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal attended by academics and mystics. Days later, back in America, her teenage son, Trip, runs away with a man who picks him up on the side of a road. Sandra tries to get a message back to Trip through the mystics, but the mystics are distracted, and her son and the strange man set out to sea.

Amie Barrodale’s first novel features restless souls, Buddhist deities, divorcees in recovery programs, arguing academics, uncomprehending school principals, and treatment centers for troubled teenagers. It journeys from body to body, through life and death and back again. It tells the story of a mother and son who find other people hard to understand and who are themselves misunderstood. Guiding this wild, unpredictable journey is deep devotion: the desire to save a child and to be a good mother despite it all.

Wide-eyed with wonder, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374617349
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Advance Praise

“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, author of Lapvona and My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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

“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

From the Publisher

2025-07-04
A mother and son undergo simultaneous odysseys in the realms of the living and the dead in this hallucinatory debut novel.

Sandra, a divorced documentary news producer, is about to fly out to cover a “Death and Denouement” conference when her ex-husband, Vic, throws a wrench in the works: He isn’t up to solo parenting their autistic teenage son, Trip, during her monthlong absence. When Trip’s therapist proposes that they address their son’s behavioral issues by sending him to a summer intensive at a facility called the Center, Sandra reluctantly agrees and heads off to Nepal. There, amid a peculiar mix of scholars focused on dying and the afterlife, Sandra dies unexpectedly and begins experiencing the liminal, pre-reincarnation period described in theTibetan Book of the Dead. As she drifts through time and place, Sandra discovers that Trip is in the middle of his own misadventure, having hitchhiked away from the Center with Anthony, a recovering addict headed to the Florida Keys in advance of a hurricane. There are few topics more emotionally rousing than the endurance of love beyond the grave, which makes the novel’s flatness all the more curious. Neither Sandra nor Trip demonstrate much narrative agency and Barrodale’s prose relies heavily on short visual descriptions (i.e., “The man looked like a Nepali David Cross”) and litanies of physical action, denying characters interiority and readers lyricism. Barrodale has clearly taken great care with the novel’s metaphysics (there are footnotes attributing ideas to real-life Buddhist practitioners throughout), but the quotes seldom contribute to clarity or propulsion—as Sandra herself responds to one, “He was making sense, but hard to understand.” There are two spectacular, disquieting sections near the start of the novel—Sandra’s death and a visit to a Nepalese shrine—and the resolution has a bittersweet profundity, but the middle is a muddle.

A maternal meditation on life and death that can’t quite live up to its cosmic ambitions.

Kirkus Reviews