Why We Took the Car

Wolfgang Herrndorf

A word of warning - do not leave your 14 year old son alone, so that you can take your wife to the rehab clinic, because you think he is too boring to get into trouble. His desire to impress the class beauty, and his friendship with the class bad boy, will lead to trouble of a kind that you cannot imagine. Think of Holden Caulfield going 'On the Road' and you get an inkling of the trouble to come.

Extract

Before I went to bed, I opened my laptop. I had four e-mails from my father complaining that I'd switched off my cell phone and wasn't answering the landline. I had to think up some excuse and would need to write him an e-mail back saying everything was going great here. Which it was. And since I didn't feel like writing the e-mail and couldn't think of a good excuse, I looked up Wallachia on Wikipedia. That's when my mind really started to race.

Parallels