Author(s): Bruno Lloret ; Ellen Jones (Translator)

Novel | Translated fiction | Fiction Reductions | Chile | Giramondo

"Extraordinary...reach es] a new, unexpected, dissident realism." --Alejandro Zambra, author of My Documents and Multiple Choice

Alone but for her memories, Nancy has returned to Chile to wait for her cancer to take her away. Before her illness, before her husband's ridiculous death, before she fled home hidden in the back of a truck, she spent her youth at Playa Roja, swimming alongside the creepy old gringos amid rumors of young women gone missing and young men found dead. Nancy's bitter mother--mi madre mala, Nancy calls her--abandoned the family and her brother disappeared without explanation. Then her father, who was all she had left, took up with a pair of young Mormon missionaries, and Nancy was left to fend for herself in a world determined to crush her spirit.

Through the haze induced by her medication, Nancy gazes deep into her adolescence and, despite the horrors that society, poverty, and family inflicted on her as a young woman, she rediscovers life--jubilant and proud. Bruno Lloret's debut novel, moodily translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, combines formal invention and heartrending storytelling punctuated by graves, footprints, x-rays, and crosses.

One of the most original books of the year' - Natalia Barbelagua, Revista Intemperie

In a small city in northern Chile, between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert, a dying woman relives her childhood and adolescence in vivid detail. In the trance induced by her illness, she recalls the breakup of her family, the disappearance of her brother, the defection of her mother, her father’s conversion to Mormonism, scenes of sexual discovery, violence and poverty played out in a degraded landscape, against the oppressive and ecstatic backdrop of religious belief.

‘This world is a desert of crosses,’ Nancy’s father tells her – and crosses in bold make up the very fabric of the novel: X marks which can be read as multiplication symbols, scars, locations on a treasure map; or as signs of erasure and the approach of death, like the cancer that threatens Nancy’s life and memories.

A powerful first novel, Nancy conveys, with great economy and dramatic typography, the energy, brutality and resilience of a life lived at the frontiers of existence.

‘We have here an extremely sensitive, intelligent, talented writer…A marvel.’ Rodrigo Hidalgo, El Guillatún

‘A novel that flows naturally and can be read quickly, which is not to say that it’s simple – quite the opposite. It toys with existential questions about what it means to be human.’ Juvenal Romero Pérez, Revista Lecturas

 Bruno Lloret was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1990. Nancy (2015), his debut novel, was highly commended in the Roberto Bolaño Prize. In 2018, he published his second novel, Leña.