Air
Switzerland

Air

by Christian Kracht

Summary

In a remote Scottish town on the Orkney Islands, Paul, a Swiss interior designer, lives a quiet, carefully ordered life devoted to aesthetics and precision. His routine is disrupted when he receives an unusual commission from a prestigious design magazine: he must travel to Norway to paint a vast data centre in the perfect shade of white. But the journey takes an unexpected turn, and Paul mysteriously disappears from his familiar reality. Elsewhere, in a strange, myth-haunted world, a young girl named Ildr discovers an injured stranger whom she initially mistakes for an animal. As she helps him recover, the two embark on a dangerous journey through an unfamiliar landscape, pursued by the soldiers of a ruthless duke. Blurring the boundaries between fantasy, reality, and dreams, Christian Kracht’s enigmatic novel explores the fragility of modern civilisation and the possibility of escaping its constraints. With precise, atmospheric prose, Air invites readers into a world where time, identity, and existence itself become uncertain.

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Christian Kracht
Christian Kracht

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist and journalist born on 29 December 1966 in Saanen, Switzerland. He is regarded as one of the most distinctive contemporary German-language writers, known for his provocative narratives, elegant prose, and explorations of history, ideology, and cultural identity. After studying film in the United States, Kracht worked in journalism and travelled extensively throughout Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific. His debut novel, Faserland (1995), became an influential work in contemporary German literature. His subsequent novels include 1979 (2001), Imperium (2012), The Dead (2016), and Eurotrash (2021). Imperium received the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, while The Dead won both the Swiss Book Prize and the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize. His novel Eurotrash was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025. Published in German in 2025, Air continues his exploration of the boundaries between history, imagination, and reality. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Kracht lives in Zurich with his family.

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Published
2026
Author
Christian Kracht