Visegrad

Visegrad is a satirical comedy set in a budding Eastern European autocracy. Its setting, the titular Visegrad, is an expatriate Mecca, a post-Soviet capital where the national sport is appearing to work as hard as possible while doing nothing at all. It is the story of Rye, an American millennial who becomes infatuated with a young couple in debt to a local bookie who has developed a secret method of purchasing outstanding student loans from the United States. Things get complicated when Rye agrees to work off the debt and signs on a battery of clients, including Colin Having, who believes that the world's dogs are in a conspiracy against him; H. Defer, an academic wunderkind 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 and his boss acquire individual debts. Soon, Rye learns he is being followed. Customers start to disappear and he discovers he is no longer free to leave the country. Now he must sabotage the lucrative business he has helped build, or else abandon his friends to the machinations of a shady cabal within the Visegrad government. A series of comic digressions that branch from the central, tragic digression of choosing to live in a foreign country, Visegrad presents world at once familiar and preposterous--a world that is even historically accurate in its an amalgamation of Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Krakow, and Berlin, even though it is a place that does not exist and therefore has no history. It is about getting away with something--being young, being cruel, falling in love. Of particular interest to readers who have travelled extensively or lived abroad, it is 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).