Trip - by Amie Barrodale (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
One of New York Times's Notable Books of the Year
One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads

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.

Review Quotes

"What a brilliant, funny, beautiful, fucked-up, heart-smashing novel."
--Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You and Home Land

"[Trip] is the book that kidnapped my consciousness and still has it as far as I'm concerned . . . Every page is a surprise. It's hysterically written. I don't think Amie Barrodale is as known as she ought to be . . . If you want to talk about anti-algorithmic books, this is the definition of that."
--Joumana Khatib on The Daily

"Brilliantly strange, funny, and moving."
--The New Yorker (Best Books of 2025)

"Such a fun, surprising, and interesting novel. I was captivated and charmed for its entirety; by the absurd humor 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, author of Happiness Forever

"Beautifully crafted, hard-boiled fun. Trip is a good time."
--Nell Zink, author of Sister Europe

"Amie Barrodale's funny, sad, heretical debut novel, Trip . . . is a magnificent and lovable work--both page-turning and coolly visionary . . . It takes an audacious novel to remind you that not only can reading fiction feel like a psychedelic experience, but that you don't even have to be dead to roam in a bardo of mutual creation. That volatile, metaphysical space between an author's mind and a reader's is there for the experiencing on this earthly plane."
--Hermione Hoby, Bookforum

"[Trip's] framework is deeply spiritual and otherworldly, but the plot is often absurdly funny, irreverent and debauched. It turns out bodiless beings can still have sex, and other dead people can be very irritating."
--Alexandra Alter, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

"One of the most out-of-left-field, strange, idiosyncratic books that I've encountered all year--and that's praise, from my point of view . . . You could not dream it up yourself. It's funny, it's smart . . . [Trip] reads like the best kind of weird Donald Barthelme story, even weird George Saunders."
--Joumana Khatib on The New York Times Book Review podcast

"In one of the most deliciously cuckoo novel plots in, well, forever, a mother who unexpectedly dies must trek through the afterlife to help her son who--wait for it!--is literally lost at sea. Get ready for Buddhism, mystics, annoying academics, and going soul-to-soul."
--Language Arts

"A singular exploration of parenting, death, addiction, and empathy, all told with a swaddling wryness. With clever nods to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the classic bildungsroman genre, and Homer's Odyssey, [Trip] is propulsive and utterly contemporary."
--Gagosian Quarterly

"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."
--John Paul Larson, 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."
--Rhoda Feng, The Washington Post

"A transcendent and dazzlingly weird novel about disconnection and difference . . . The novel's strangeness comes to seem entirely intentional, and brilliant. Trip captures something of how it might feel to have your brain work differently from everyone else's, the loneliness and alienation of it. The story's inscrutable moments even take on a sort of beauty. Like Sandra, the reader is asked to let go of the pinched need to have it all make sense, all the time--to instead open our eyes and simply see what's there, in all its irreducible mystery."
--Chelsea Leu, The New York Times Book Review

"A worthy addition to the small but ancient genre of literary works that explore the afterlife . . . Barrodale demonstrates a remarkable ear for dialogue that echoes the absurdities of communication . . . And, despite Sandra's wild travails, her frail, seemingly inextinguishable first person point of view--the irreducible 'I'--persists. As does Barrodale's nimbly ironic omniscient narration. When the two combine, it demonstrates that though love may not be stronger than death, fiction can at least make it mighty entertaining."
--Peter Keough, The Arts Fuse

"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

About the Author