Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize A profound novel about motherhood, friendship, and the power of community from "one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature" (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive). Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own. Alina's pregnancy shakes the women's lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor's son, both women...

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man's desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences. Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical, The Accidentals is the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.

One of the most important and watched writers of today.Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel's stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. "Ptosis" is told from the point of view of the daughter of a photographer whose work involves before and after pictures of patients undergoing cosmetic eye surgeries. In "Through Shades," a woman studies a man interacting with a woman through the windows of the apartment across the street. In one of the longer stories, "Bonsai," a man visits a garden, and comes to know a gardener, during the period of dissolution of his marriage. "The Other Side of the Dock" describes a young girl in search of what she terms "True Solitude," who finds a fellow soul mate only...

The first novel to appear in English by one of the most talked-about and critically acclaimed writers of new Mexican fiction.From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood--in which she was born with an abnormality in her eye into a family intent on fixing it. In a world without the time and space for innocence, the narrator intimately recalls her younger self--a fierce and discerning girl open to life's pleasures and keen to its ruthless cycle of tragedy.With raw language and a brilliant sense of humor, both delicate and unafraid, Nettel strings together hard-won, unwieldy memories--taking us from Mexico City to Aix-en-Provence, France, then back home again--to create a portrait of the artist as a young girl. In these pages, Nettel's art of storytelling transforms experience into inspiration and a new startling perception of reality."Nettel's eye...gives rise to a tension, subtle but persistent, that immerses us in an...

Claudio's apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love's inevitable loss.