A rollicking dark comedy of young American expats caught up in a shadowy student debt scheme, set in an imaginary—but unnervingly familiar—present-day Eastern European state

“Swashbuckling their way across an imagined version of Europe, the characters in Duncan Robertson’s picaresque novel are caught in a web of deceptions and chaos. Wise-cracking, funny, and a little transgressive, they will linger in your mind long after you’ve finished this first-rate book.”
—Pauls Toutonghi, author of Evel Knievel Days, Red Weather, and Dog Gone

Trade Paperback Original | $16.95
March 15, 2022 | 352 Pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4
ISBN 978-1-7345379-3-2
Rights: North America & Open Market
Genre: Literary Fiction

ABOUT THE BOOK

Meet Rye, a young American writer adrift in Visegrad, a place 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 invented, surrealistic 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 Arthur Phillips’ Prague, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors, David Szalay’s All That Man Is, Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Svejk.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Duncan Robertson is an American writer who has lived abroad, both in South Korea and Eastern Europe, since 2011. A native of Seattle, Washington, Robertson currently resides in Budapest, where he edits Panel, a magazine of English- language literature out of Central and Eastern Europe. His work has appeared in Expat Press Online, North Dakota Quarterly, and Unlikely Stories.