Simon Lopez Trujillo's 'mind-blowing' (Gabriela Cabezon Camara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance.
In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of Lopez Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves- the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro's condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.
For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, Lopez Trujillo is a next-generation Bolano with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.
'A heady and thrilling sci-fi debut ... colourfully satiric ... The plot simmers with violence, including fierce sibling rivalry and political turmoil as Chile is engulfed in protests ... but Trujillo's careful attention to detail and Myers's smooth translation makes it go down easy.' -Publishers Weekly
'An inspired mycelial novel that is as propulsive as it is unsettling. Myers shines in her translation of fever dream while L pez Trujillo, with the excentric darkness of much of the best contemporary Latin American literature, hypnotises and haunts.' -Jennifer Croft, translator and author of The Extinction of Irena Rey
'This short, intense novel ... is speculative fiction about an ominous change to human life as we know it in the wake of ecological destruction ... Told through alternating viewpoints, moving between conscious and unconscious experience ... it is an unsettling, hallucinogenic trip that lingers in the mind.' -Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian
