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Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch's Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.
"I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms," writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch's narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents' old house in the small hometown she hates but can't bring herself to leave.
When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch's wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.
"Layered, experimental, and fragmented, this novel embraces the strangeness both in and around us." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Bewitching...and consistently sharp. Fans of dreamy and mysterious fiction like Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond will devour this." —Publishers Weekly
"Koch is a Swiss playwright and visual artist, and her debut novel is a slim, dreamlike, and bizarre—in short, a perfect escape from all you're looking to escape." —Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated"
"So many novels have been written about immigration ... that you might think there's nothing more to say. But then you read Overstaying by Ariane Koch. A winner of Germany's Aspekte Literature Prize and a Swiss Literature Prize in its original German, the novel takes these themes and transforms them into a strange, brilliant fever dream." —Financial Times (UK)
"[A] bizarre and beautiful psychodrama about hospitality, control, and domination.... Koch's novel seems to take place half in the 'real world' and half in a Leonora Carrington painting... Novels like this aren't about plot, per se, but Koch develops such an engaging offbeat dynamic, and ends each short chapter on such a deliciously provocative flourish—aided by Damion Searls's supple translation—that you race through, desperate to find out the next small act of cruelty of indignity." —The Telegraph (UK)
"Overstaying is a short novel of huge ambition. Much of its beauty lies in its arresting use of language, the unruly juxtaposition of images that ought not to cohere but somehow do, jolting us from our complacency towards a more vital understanding of the world. Damion Searls's translation from the Swiss German is lucid and precise...Hypnotic and masterly, this is a book that creates its own world, forcing us to look at our own through altered eyes." —Times Literary Supplement (UK)
This information about Overstaying was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ariane Koch was born in Basel and studied fine arts and interdisciplinarity. She writes—often in collaboration—theatre and performance texts, radio plays and prose. Her texts have won numerous awards and have been performed in places like Basel, Berlin, Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow. Overstaying is her debut novel.
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