The second novel by the internationally celebrated writer Alejandro Zambra, a "short and strikingly original" (The New Yorker) book about the stories we spin for ourselves and our loved ones-now reissued by Penguin Veronica is late, and Julian is increasingly convinced she won't ever come home. To pass the time, he improvises a story about trees to coax his stepdaughter, Daniela, to sleep. He has made a life as a literature professor, developing a novel about a man tending to a bonsai tree on the weekends. He is a narrator, an architect, a chronicler of other people's stories. But as the night stretches on before him, and the hours pass with no sign of Veronica, Julian finds himself caught up in the slipstream of the story of his life-of their lives together. What combination of desire and coincidence led them here, to this very night? What will the future-and possibly motherless-Daniela think of him and his stories? Why tell stories at all? The second novel by acclaimed Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, The Private Lives of Trees overflows with his signature wit and his gift for crafting short novels that manage to contain whole worlds.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'Beautiful, horrible... the most exciting discovery I've made in fiction for some time' Kazuo Ishiguro 'Smoky, carnal, dazzling' Lauren Groff Welcome to Buenos Aires, a place of nightmares and twisted imaginings, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. Thrumming with murderous intentions, family betrayals and morbid desires, these stories shine a light on a violent city gripped by urban madness; giving voice to the lost, the oppressed and the forgotten. Lucid and darkly poetic, unsettling and otherworldly, these tales of revenge, witchcraft and fetishes are a masterpiece of contemporary Gothic and a bewitching exploration of the dark inclinations that threaten to lead us over the edge. 'There is some serious power in this writing' Daisy Johnson

From the acclaimed author of Fish Soup , a novel of motherhood, memory, and possibility just this side of the uncanny. In The_Delivery_ , an enormous package arrives that can’t be opened, Agatha the cat appears and disappears, half-finished buildings punctuate the horizon—semi-ordinary happenings that take on an otherworldly cast if you look at them sideways. And nothing is stranger, in this high rise apartment far from home, than the tenuous bonds of family that hold us together, or don’t. The narrator works, zooms with her sister, makes plans for the future (a writing residency, a child), and tentatively probes her past, while subtle fissures open up around her, changing her life forever. As she says about her childhood home, “Sometimes I get curious…but I don’t ask, because the answer could come with information I’d rather not know.� By turns tender and biting, this is Robayo’s finest work yet.

Shortlisted for the Premio Valle Inclan, 2020 Nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, 2019 A SPELLBINDING COLLECTION OF STORIES FROM A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL LITERARY STAR The crunch of a bird's wing. A cloud of butterflies, so beautiful it smothers. A crimson flash of blood across an artist's canvas. Spine-tingling and unexpected, unearthly and strange, the stories of Mouthful of Birds are impossible to forget. Samanta Schweblin's writing expertly blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday, pulling the reader into a world that is at once nightmarish and beautiful. An exhilarating tour de force guaranteed to leave the pulse racing.

Thrilling and terrifying, Things We Lost in the Fire takes the reader into a world of Argentine Gothic. A world of sharp-toothed children and young girls racked by desire, where demons lurk beneath the river and stolen skulls litter the pavements. A world where the secrets half-buried under Argentina's terrible dictatorship rise up to haunt the present day, and where women, exhausted by a plague of violence, find that their only path out lies in the flames...

"This slim and vital novel is a tour de force; it will floor you, and lift you right the way up-I adored it." -Claire-Louise Bennett, author of POND During the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist and narrator, dies after being struck by lightning. This marks the opening of a novel that combines memoir and fiction, unveiling an intimate exploration of the brotherly bond, while laying bare the effects that death can have on those closest to us and also on ourselves._It's always the happiest and most talented who die young. People who die young are always the happiest of all... _Can grief be put into words? Can we truly rationalise death to the point of embracing it? Older Brother is the vehicle Mella uses to tackle these fundamental questions, playing with tenses and narrating in the future, as if all calamities described are yet to unfold. In a style reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis and J.D. Salinger, recalling in parts Cronenberg's or Burgess's examination of violence and society, Mella takes us with him in this dizzying journey right into the centre of his own neurosis and obsessions, where fatality is skilfully used to progressively draw the reader further in.

A visionary novel about our interconnected world, about the collision of horror and humanity, from the Man Booker-shortlisted master of the spine-tingling tale A Guardian & Observer Best Fiction Book of 2020 * A Sunday Times Best Science Fiction Book of the Year * The Times Best Science Fiction Books of the Year * NPR Best Books of the Year World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2020 * Ebook Travel Guides Best 5 Books of 2020 * A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 They're not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in your home. You can trust them. They care about you... They've infiltrated apartments in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of Sierra Leone, town squares of Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. Anonymous and untraceable, these seemingly cute cuddly toys reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls - but they also expose the ugly truth of our interconnected society. Samanta Schweblin's wildly imaginative new novel pulls us into a dark and complex world of unexpected love, playful encounters and marvellous adventures. But beneath the cuddly exterior, kentukis conceal a truth that is unsettlingly familiar and exhilaratingly real. This is our present and we're living it - we just don't know it yet. *Little Eyes comes with two different covers, and the cover you receive will be chosen at random*

"Sublime . . . true and beautiful and moving." -The New York Times Book Review The landmark first novel of one of the greatest living Latin American writers-now in a sparkling new translation by his longtime collaborator When it was first published in 2006, then-literary critic and poet Alejandro Zambra's first novel, Bonsai, caused a sensation. "It was said," according to Chile's newspaper of record, El Mercurio, "that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters." Zambra would go on to become a writer of international renown, winning prizes in Chile and around the world for his funny, tender, sly fictions. Here, in a brilliant new translation from four-time International Booker Prize nominee Megan McDowell, is the little book that started it all: The story of Julio and Emilia, two Chilean university students who, seeking truth in great literature, find one another instead. As they fall together and drift apart over the course of young adulthood, Zambra spins an emotionally engrossing, expertly distilled, formally inventive tale of love, art, and memory.

Lucina, a young Chilean writer, has moved to New York to pursue an academic career. While at a party one night, something that her doctors had long warned might happen finally occurs: her eyes haemorrhage. Within minutes, blood floods her vision, reducing her sight to sketched outlines and tones of grey, rendering her all but blind. As she begins to adjust to a very different life, those who love her begin to adjust to a very different woman - one who is angry, raw, funny, sinister, sexual and dizzyingly alive.

A young boy plays hide and seek in the suburbs of Santiago, unaware that his neighbours are becoming entangled in the brutality of Pinochet's regime. Then one night a mysterious girl appears in his neighbourhood and makes a life-changing request.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR'S "BOOKS WE LOVE" "A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent...[Chilean Poet] broadens the author's scope and quite likely his international reputation." -Los Angeles Times "Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own." -Juan Vidal, NPR.org A writer of "startling talent" (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family-a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions-in Gonzalo's case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather's love of poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets-not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolanos, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru's research leads her into this eccentric community-another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other? In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments-sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound-that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships-a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend-it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.

Gonzalo is a frustrated would-be poet in a city full of poets; poets lurk in every bookshop, prop up every bar, ready to debate the merits of Teillier and Millan (but never Neruda - beyond the pale). Then, nine years after their bewildering breakup, Gonzalo reunites with his teen sweetheart, Carla, who is now, to his surprise, the mother of a young son, Vicente. Soon they form a happy sort-of family - a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. In time, fate and ambition pull the lovers apart, but when it comes to love and poetry, what will be Gonzalo's legacy to his not-quite-stepson Vicente? Zambra chronicles with tenderness and insight the everyday moments - absurd, painful, sexy, sweet, profound - that constitute family life in this bold and brilliant new novel.

In San Agustin de Tango, you can never be sure what's waiting around the corner. Over the course of a single day - the day before today - the hero of this novel and his adored wife embark on a journey through the absurd and the surreal, encountering a choir of monkeys and a carnivorous ostrich, travelling from the studio of an artist obsessed with the colour green to the waistcoat pocket of a pot-bellied man. All the while, the tolling of the bell in the city square pushes their whirlwind adventure towards its fateful conclusion.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017 A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. The two seem anxious and, at David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past. As David pushes her to recall whatever trauma has landed her in her terminal state, he unwittingly opens a chest of horrors, and suddenly the terrifying nature of their reality is brought into shocking focus. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange and deeply unsettling psychological menace in this cautionary tale of maternal love, broken souls and the power and desperation of family.

* An Oprah Daily Book of 2022 * A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three-time International Booker Prize finalist, 'lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.' –O, the Oprah magazine Cross the threshold of these seven empty houses and enter the dark, destabilising world of Samanta Schweblin. Here, homes are not a place of safety. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. And in these tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back in: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, or the fallibility of parents. Seven Empty Houses offers an entry point into a fiercely original mind. In each story, the twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin and reveals uncomfortable truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.