Description

The International Bestseller

‘Just stellar – extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled’ – Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
‘These stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside’ – Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

The strange and explosive new collection from the incomparable imagination of Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short story.

A gripping blend of the raw, the astonishing and the tragic, every story is as perfectly unexpected as a snare: tightly, exquisitely wound, ready to snap at a touch.

Here, a young father is haunted by the consequences of a moment of distraction; tragedy is complicated by the inexplicable appearance of an injured horse; an attempted poisoning leads two writers to startling conclusions; a lonely woman’s charity is rewarded with home-invasion. And in the shocking opening story, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring.

Guilt, grief and relationships severed permeate this mesmerizing collection – but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love and longing, each sinister and beautiful. Step by step these unnerving stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life – ourselves.

‘No one writes like Samanta Schweblin’ – Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home

Publisher Review

Just stellar – extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled — Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon ”I’ll be staying at home and reading lots over summer – several books by Samanta Schweblin; I recommend her Good and Evil and Other Stories. She is a fabulous writer. Her stories are subtle, always haunting and deeply human’ — Isabel Allende, author of The Wind Knows My Name ‘Time and again in her masterful new collection, Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature’ — Karen Russell, author of The Antidote No one writes like Samanta Schweblin. Her narratives are sui generis – wonderfully unpredictable and invitingly strange — Lorrie Moore, author of I am Homeless if This Is Not My Home Samanta Schweblin combines the urgent propulsion that characterizes all great storytelling with precise, if uncanny, descriptions of human feelings that often go unnamed, those ambiguous zones of human reality where awe, dread, and desire mingle — Siri Hustvedt, author of Memories of the Future These stories understand the secret moments and strange connections that resonate through a person’s life – and they explore these intimacies with a razor sharp edge. Samantha Schweblin is at the top of her game — Heather Parry, author of Carrion Crow These beautifully crafted and eerily unsettling stories completely hypnotised me. This is the sort of storytelling which resonates in the head, the heart and all mysterious parts in between. I wish I could write like this — Jan Carson, author of The Raptures ‘The book I wish I had written’ — Lisa Taddeo on Fever Dream ‘Read this in a single sitting and by the end I could hardly breathe. It’s a total mind-wrecker. Amazing. Thrilling’ — Max Porter on Fever Dream ‘The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin’s darkly humorous tales of people who have slipped through cracks or fallen down holes into alternate realities’ — J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize winning author of Disgrace, on Mouthful of Birds ‘Schweblin has a true talent for getting to the centre of our fears and drawing them out’ — Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters, on Little Eyes ‘Schweblin’s particular genius lies in the fact that there’s something inherently savage and ungovernable about her work’ — Financial Times, on Seven Empty Houses ‘Schweblin’s imagination seemingly knows no bounds’ — Vanity Fair on Mouthful of Birds ‘A master of elegant and uncanny fiction . . . she can evoke more feelings in one sentence than many writers can in a whole story . . . a writer whose potential is beginning to seem limitless’ — NPR on Mouthful of Birds ‘Strange and beautiful’ — Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars, on Mouthful of Birds ‘Genius’ — Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror, on Fever Dream ‘Sickeningly good’ — Emma Cline, author of The Guest, on Fever Dream ‘Schweblin delivers a skin-prickling masterclass in dread and suspense’ — The Economist, on Fever Dream