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)

Sylvia Molloy

Translated by Jennifer Croft

Almost every day, the narrator visits ML., a close friend who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Based on these encounters and ML.’s fragments of memory, she constructs a powerfully moving tale about the breakdown of a mind that progressively erases everything in a very peculiar way.

An attempt through writing to ‘make a relation endure despite the ruin, to hold up even if only a few words remain’. ‘How does someone who can’t remember say ‘I’?’ asks the narrator, considering this woman who shows her around the house as if she were visiting for the first time, or who is unable to say she feels dizzy, yet is perfectly capable of translating into English a message saying that she feels dizzy.

Passages from a shared past and present that are transformed into fiction when faced with a forgetting that can no longer refute them. A book that opposes disintegration with a precise and vital prose and the unique sensibility of one of Latin America’s greatest storytellers.

Sebastián Martínez Daniell

Translated by Jennifer Croft

Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move.

A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.