From the International Booker Shortlisted author of Still Born, a powerful collection of stories about characters coping with estrangement, isolation, and the unknown.

Acclaimed for her piercing insights and razor-sharp prose, award winning author Guadalupe Nettel introduces us to eight characters who are each in their own way lost and wandering, struggling to connect with the people around them.

In Imprinting, Nettel shows us a young woman finding an unexpected affinity with an estranged uncle, whose exile from the family is too deep a secret for his niece to know. She introduces us, in Life Elsewhere, to a frustrated actor who begins, without realizing it, to take over the life and house of a more successful former colleague. And in The Torpor, we meet a woman who lives with her children in a dying world where it is better to be asleep than awake.

With her signature bold, stark style of writing that makes her work a revelation (Katie Kitamura, author of INTIMACIES), this stunning collection interrogates humanity's struggle to communicate and reveals the universal longing for connection.

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 are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.

In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

Praise for Guadalupe Nettel:
Nettel offers her keen attention and sympathy to any living thing struggling to get by. --The New York Times
Nettel has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold. --Nick Flynn
The gaze [Nettel] turns on madnesses both temperate and destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us seeing straight into our own obsessions. --Le Monde

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.

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 are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.

In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon's touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.

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 uncomfortable reality, disquieting, even disturbing--a gaze that illuminates her prose like an alien sun shining down on our world. --Valeria Luiselli, author of Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd

It has been a long time since I've found in the literature of my generation a world as personal and untransferable as that of Guadalupe Nettel. --Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling

Nettel reveals the subliminal beauty within beings...and painstakingly examines the intimacies of her soul. --Magazine Littéraire

Guadalupe Nettel's storytelling power is majestic.--Typographical Era

In Praise of Natural Histories

Five flawless stories... --The New York Times

Nettel's stories are as atmospheric and emotionally battering as Checkhov's.--Asymptote

In a precise writing style that is both subtle and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite. Natural Histories is the winner of the 3rd Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives, an important Spanish literature prize.

In a precise writing style that is both subtle and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite. Natural Histories is the winner of the 3rd Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives, an important Spanish literature prize.