Trip By Amie Barrodale

A mother embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to save her son who is literally and figuratively lost at a hilarious, gut-wrenching debut novel.

Sandra dies unexpectedly at a spiritual conference in Nepal. Across the world, her son, Trip, has run away from a treatment center in the American desert, which was supposed to help him overcome his refusal to go to school.

Trip is not sure where to go next—but a strange man picks him up on the side of a road where Trip has just been bitten by a lizard. As Sandra roves through the past and present in her new state of limbo, Trip and his new companion, Anthony, venture farther south, directly into the eye of a hurricane. When Sandra learns what has happened to her son, her struggle to help him from the other realm begins.

Amie Barrodale’s gripping dual odyssey of mother and son takes us from Florida’s Gulf Stream to the raging seas, on Miami-and Munich-bound airplanes, from body to body. It’s about childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between. 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.