Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

One of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of the Year: An uncategorizable, “astonishing and captivating” novel of obsession, adventure, and coconuts (Karl Ove Knausgaard, New York Times–bestselling author of My Struggle).

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.

Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt’s life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a sympathetic outsider—mocked, misunderstood, physically assaulted—and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.

Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Christian Kracht’s international bestseller is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant—sometimes all on the same page. His allusions are misleading, his historical time lines are twisted, his narrator is unreliable—and the result is a novel that is also a mirror cabinet and a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, Imperium, by a recipient of the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize and the Swiss Book Prize, is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you’ve read before.

“This barbed account of failed idealism shines a bright light on the ravages of obsession, all the while sprinkling the trail with memorably bizarre details.” —The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“A delightful historical farce.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard

“[A] strange, engrossing tale, by turns slapstick, philosophical, and suspenseful.” —Publishers Weekly

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9780374709860

Translators: Daniel Bowles

Release date

Ebook: 26 March 2024