Overstaying

An isolated woman clashes with an enigmatic visitor in this funny, jagged parable about integration, difference and hospitality An isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as 'the visitor'. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, and the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, and she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders and regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman's fantasies of power and control grow ever wilder. Sly, wilful and full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound and uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration and the stranger within all of us.

An isolated woman clashes with an enigmatic visitor in this funny, jagged parable about integration, difference and hospitality An isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as 'the visitor'. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, and the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, and she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders and regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman's fantasies of power and control grow ever wilder. Sly, wilful and full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound and uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration and the stranger within all of us.

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.

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.