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

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