Description

A portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades Guardian

Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires – a place where reality and the preternatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These stories follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina s dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is a paragon of contemporary Gothic from a writer of singular vision.

Mariana Enriquez is a mesmerizing writer who demands to be read. Like Bolano, she is interested matters of life and death, and her fiction hits with the force of a freight train. Dave Eggers