A Perfect Cemetery
£9.99
Federico Falco
Translated by Jennifer Croft
FINALIST OF THE GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ SHORT STORY PRIZE
In the middle of a blizzard a widow is looking out at the ruin of her late-husband’s garden, when suddenly she sees a woman running naked in the falling snow. After telling her parents she is abandoning her Christian faith, a girl becomes infatuated with a Mormon missionary who reminds her of a boy killed in her village years before. When his family’s home is lost, a father desperately offers his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who will take them in. And a town’s mayor tries to fulfil his father’s dying wish: to design the perfect cemetery.
In a series of interlinked stories written in disarming, darkly humorous prose, Federico Falco explores themes of obsessive love, romantic attachment and the strategies we must find to cope with death and painful longing.
‘Perfectly honed.’ —Ñ Magazine, Clarín (Argentina)
‘Extraordinary quality.’—El Mercurio (Chile)
‘One of the most talented Latin American authors.’—El Espectador (Colombia)
The Plains
£11.99
Federico Falco
Translated by Jennifer Croft
After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self.
'In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible,' our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade. So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-up that prompted him to take refuge in this patch of now-carefully tended land.