Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Kochs Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.

I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatiala 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. Kochs narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents old house in the small hometown she hates but cant 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 presencepossibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Kochs wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.