Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

Mariana Enríquez populates contemporary urban Argentina with a macabre cast of crooked witches, unruly teenagers, homeless ghosts and hungry women. Translated by Megan McDowell.

As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken – fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history – with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighbourhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.