August Engelhardt is the author of an 1898 pamphlet entitled A Carefree Future, where he describes a utopian society founded on nudism and a diet of coconuts, so-called cocovorism.

Fleeing the persecution he endured for his peculiarities, Engelhardt travels from Germany to the Bismarck Archipelago in German New Guinea to realize his ideas on a coconut plantation.

Engelhardt visits Mittenzwey but discovers him to be a fraud, who in collaboration with Govindarajan accepts expensive gifts from his followers but eats food in secret.

Several years later, Max Lützow, a popular German musician suffering from hypochondria who has grown tired of the bourgeois lifestyle in Europe, arrives at Kabakon to join Engelhardt's order.

While garnering ridicule in Germany, Lützow's letters nevertheless entice a group of young, ill-prepared Germans to embark for the Bismarck Archipelago, where they arrive destitute and fall prey to tropical diseases.

When Slütter arrives at Kabakon, Engelhardt has rejected most of his philosophy, developed an abstruse antisemitic conspiracy theory, and now advocates cannibalism as the path to divinity.

[4] It has also been published in Spanish, Croatian, Korean, Turkish, French, Danish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Estonian, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Hebrew, Norwegian, Dutch, Lithuanian, Romanian and Czech, with Portuguese, Mongolian, Serbian, and Bulgarian versions in preparation.

Rheinische Post's literature critic Lothar Schröder wrote: It is a book about visions, about a romantic, about German history up to World War II—and all of that is written in a light, self-ironic tone, so that every page is a bright reading pleasure.

[5] Richard Kämmerlings wrote in Die Welt:In ironic-divine omniscience [Kracht] designs a historical panorama where Engelhardt's vision is woven in.

... Mann, Kafka and Hermann Hesse appear in small episodes incognito, but still clearly recognisable (very loosely motivated), others wave with fence posts thick as ship's masts, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

The story bounces around in time, shifts in tone from philosophical to suspenseful to slapstick, features cameos from peculiar historical figures (such as the American inventor of Vegemite spread), and periodically widens its scope to consider the menacing rise of Nazism.

Though Kracht, whose books have been translated into more than 25 languages, occasionally flaunts his research and succumbs to an overwrought style, he inventively captures the period's zeitgeist through one incurable eccentric.

[7] And Huffington Post writes: Creepy, unsettling and morbidly funny, Imperium takes the unlikely subjects of South Seas adventure and coconut eating to weave a satirical spin on ideological extremism.

[8]A critic for Der Spiegel, Georg Diez, triggered a public debate in German newspapers by accusing Kracht of propounding a "racist worldview" in Imperium.

"[11] The letter was signed by Daniel Kehlmann, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, Monika Maron, Uwe Timm and Katja Lange-Müller, among others.