"Mariana Enriquez is a witch and a prophet and a witness for those existing in liminal spaces, and, like, also some kind of spindly thorn bush that grows in South America and becomes integral to how you view a landscape."
"This book made me feel like something was watching me from my closet. And
that something could have been a zombie child I’m afraid of having one day
or the beautiful girl with scars on her arm I sat next to in math class who
I wanted to be friends because she scared me, a dead friend I never texted
back, all the men who told me to calm down, or my own fucked up country.
These stories have undead lives of their own. They have bugs crawling out
of their ears. They leave dirty footprints in your kitchen. These stories
want to scare you, but also, like the women who inhabit them, want to be
believed."
Publisher Hogarth
Publication Date 2017-02-21
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S. / Archived Staff Suggestions / Melissa L.-O.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780451495112
In these wildly imaginative, devilishly daring tales of the macabre, internationally bestselling author Mariana Enriquez brings contemporary Argentina to vibrant life as a place where shocking inequality, violence, and corruption are the law of the land, while military dictatorship and legions of desaparecidosloom large in the collective memory. In these stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, three young friends distract themselves with drugs and pain in the midst a government-enforced blackout; a girl with nothing to lose steps into an abandoned house and never comes back out; to protest a viral form of domestic violence, a group of women set themselves on fire.
But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters—mothers and daughters, husbands and wives—into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
