Duncan Robertson Visegrad

Annotation

Meet Rye, a young American writer adrift in Visegrad, where the national sport is appearing to work as hard as possible while doing nothing at all. Things get complicated in this rollicking satire when Rye partners with a loan-shark who has purchased the outstanding student debt of his fellow expats. He squares their accounts by signing the likes of Colin Having, who suspects the world's dogs of conspiring against him, H. Defer, who is developing a universal theory based on the wetness of feet, and the SEC man, who has been sent to Visegrad to determine how Rye's boss acquires individual student loans. Before long, Rye discovers he is being followed. Customers disappear and he is no longer free to leave the country. Rye realizes that he must sabotage the lucrative business he has helped build, or else abandon his friends to a shady cabal in the Visegrad government. Visegrad presents a world at once familiar and preposterous--an imaginary world, and yet one that is historically accurate in its an amalgamation of Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Krakow, and Berlin. It is about getting away with something--being young, being cruel, falling in love. A must for fans of Prague (Arthur Phillips); The Sellout (Paul Beatty); Necessary Errors (Caleb Crain); All That Man Is (David Szalay); and Temporary People (Deepak Unnikrishnan).