Blends the inventiveness of contemporary speculative fiction with the literary verve of Knausgaard - perfect for fans of Hari Kunzru, Solvej Balle or Kazuo Ishiguro

'Christian Kracht is the great German-language writer of his generation' Joshua CohenTwo men venture through strange landscapes towards unknowable destinations. Paul, a feted designer, wanders the echoing corridors of a server farm in Norway - before, in a sudden blackout, he seems to vanish. In another time and space, a wounded stranger wakes in a forest, watched over by a young girl who helps him flee to an icebound settlement where perhaps he will find safety.Inventive, enigmatic and chromatically resonant, Air is the seductively disorienting new novel from one of the most significant European writers working today. Heir to the ingenious fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin or Jorge Luis Borges, resistant to single interpretation, it unfolds as a haunting journey through a layered universe that may be a dream, the afterlife or reality's inverted twin.TRANSLATED BY DANIEL BOWLESPRAISE FOR EUROTRASH: 'Odd and evocative, a frolicking rumination' Times Critics' Best Book of the Year'Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving' Financial Times Best Translated Book of the Year

Details

ISBN13: 9781805228844
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 208
Edition: Main
Publication Date: 21 Jul 2026
Publisher:
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.8(H)x12.8(L)x2(W)187
Weight (gm): 187

Author Biography

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose work has been translated into thirty languages. His novels include Faserland, 1979, Imperium, The Dead, which won the Swiss Book Prize and the Hermann Hesse Award, and Eurotrash, which was nominated for the International Booker Prize.

Reviews

It is Christian Kracht's fate to be among the last humanists, not to say humans, practising literature as the robots swarm. His Air is part saga, part simulation, which tells of how it feels and how crazy it makes you, to simultaneously hold the mythical and the virtual accountable to true and beautiful words -- Joshua Cohen
Christian Kracht is a writer we cannot do without today. Air is a transgression - a form of storytelling that reinvents storytelling itself -- Georgi Gospodinov, International Booker-winning author of Time Shelter
In Kracht's nominal realism, a dreamlike air insistently prevails. You read him for the experience of reading him. You read him and wonder -- Nell Zink, author of Sister Europe
Kracht's elegant and surprising sentences are a pleasure to read ... Air proceeds with seamless dream logic * Financial Times *
A splendidly wrong-footing blend of sci-fi and historical fiction ... delivering a thunderbolt twist to make you rethink what you've just read. Mixing an action-thriller chase romp with a brain-teasing novel of ideas, it may be the boldest attempt yet to make fiction out of our data-hungry digital age * Daily Mail *
Kracht has great fun with Air ... The prose is translucent, in a mesmerising translation by Daniel Bowles * Observer *
Ever since his era-defining debut, Christian Kracht has enjoyed a reputation as both a cult and a canonical author... Air is as enigmatic as its title * TLS *
An exploration of the role of fantasy in modern life more generally ... read it twice and Air is revealed to be a puzzle with a certain logic * The Times *
A consistently surprising work, whose mysteries send you back to the first page the moment it ends * Literary Review *
Playfully surreal ... . Kracht has taken a familiar premise - brooding creative types, bored of their own cleverness - and made it suggestively strange * Guardian *
Sublime and funny ... deserves to be his breakout book in the Anglophone world ... a satire on millennial pretensions - something like Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico - but combined with the serious philosophical fantasy of Philip Pullman or Ursula K Le Guin. It doesn't sound as though it could possibly work; but it does, and brilliantly so * Telegraph 5-star review *
Weird, messy - and yet eerily, unaccountably compelling * The New York Times *
Such raw mythmaking material ... One of the joys of Air, down to the breathy purity of its title, is its contempt for design-an easy target, but one for which Kracht has sharpened his blade. He doesn't want to be understood, and this is somehow charming * Harper's Magazine *
The author spins a stylish kind of strangeness. The writing, in Daniel Bowles's translation from the German, is glass-like and pristine, coloured by the characters' changing moods the way a window is touched by light and shadow * Wall Street Journal *
Praise for Eurotrash -- :
Astonishing and captivating -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
Quite simply a joy to read... a brilliant and unsettling reckoning with history and memory, and with the ambiguities inherent in the art of writing fiction * Sunday Times *
Not only moving and uplifting, but strangely funny * Guardian *
Deliciously disrespectful ... not only a hilariously unsettling road-trip of a novel, but also an exhilarating read * Financial Times *
Reading Christian Kracht's Eurotrash is like holding up a mirror to another mirror and admiring the infinite reflections * New Statesman *
Hilarious, unsettling and unexpectedly moving * Washington Post *
Very funny and very precisely written * TLS *