Rick O’Shea: Everyone should read this vital word-of-mouth phenomenon

Last year I stopped off for a couple of days in Geneva on a slow train trip from Paris to the Art Biennale in Venice. It seemed a dull, forbidding city, full of high-end boutiques rubbing up against rows of private banks with discreet name plaques in elegant 19th century buildings. I got my kicks by visiting the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just outside the city (you have read these columns before, right?) but I was happy to move on.

Swiss author Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash (translated by Daniel Bowles) seemed an opportunity to pry into the psychology of what it means to be Swiss and loaded. It’s sort of autofiction – the main character is named Christian, a Swiss writer who wrote a famous novel called Faserland in the 1990s, just as Kracht did..