Description

AN IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK TO CATCH YOUR IMAGINATION IN 2025

‘A psychedelic fever dream’ ESQUIRE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025

‘A wildly original anti-capitalist satire’ GUARDIAN

‘A rip-roaring satire of late capitalism and humanity’s unerring instinct for self-sabotage’ IRISH TIMES

‘An incandescent imagination’ VALERIA LUISELLI

The year is 2272. New York and Buenos Aires were submerged years ago and the Patagonian archipelagos are the only habitable lands on Earth. Here, Dengue Boy is a humanoid mosquito whose monstrous appearance repulses everyone, including his own mother.

As the world spirals to its end, Dengue Boy searches for the meaning of his life and his true origins. Elsewhere, adults exploit the value of pandemics on the Stock Exchange and waste the last of Earth’s resources, while their privileged children plug into virtual realities and stream violent video games. For readers of China Mieville, Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez, with joyful, savage flair, Dengue Boy blends body horror and cyberpunk to deliver an extraordinary portrait of a demented future.

Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery

Publisher Review

Michel Nieva goes all out with this steampunk book … Smart, funny and brutal — Mariana Enriquez, author of Our Share of Night An incandescent imagination, illuminating the strangeness of all that surrounds us with a precise balance of tension and tenderness — Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive A part human and part mosquito child born from an experiment gone wrong goes on a journey, and a post-post-post capitalist world is on the brink of collapse. Sign me up. * Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2025 * The book of a genius — Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Montano’s Malady In Dengue Boy by Argentinian writer Michel Nieva (translated by Rahul Bery) the year is 2272, the Patagonian archipelagos are the only place left habitable on Earth and Dengue Boy is a half-humanoid mosquito. It’s a part body horror, part cyberpunk novel of a world being squeezed for its last resources. — Rick O’Shea * Irish Independent, Books to Capture Your Imagination in 2025 * Dengue Boy is a striking reminder of the power of genre fiction to speak truth to power and to vividly reveal the uncomfortable inequalities our society is built on. It mixes plausible biological and technological speculation with cutting satire and imaginatively surreal imagery. Nieva has created a modern masterpiece, and established himself as a key new voice in speculative fiction * Fantasy Hive * Nieva’s English-language debut boils both into a hallucinogenic cocktail about the end of one world and the beginnings of another . . . [Dengue Boy is] a hyperkinetic, audacious grotesquerie about metamorphosis and the inevitability of change. * Kirkus Reviews *