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Fever Dream
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2017
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A first English translation by an award-winning Spanish author follows the nightmarish experiences of a dying woman and a boy beside her hospital bed, who explore the dynamics of broken souls, toxic relationships and the power and desperation of family. - (Baker & Taylor)

“A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin’s outlandish imagination.”
–Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations

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. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.      
 
Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel. - (Penguin Putnam)

Author Biography

Samantha Schweblin was chosen as one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35 by Granta. She is the author of three story collections which have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into 20 languages. Fever Dream is her first novel and is a finalist for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize and winner of the Tigre Juan Prize. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
 
Megan McDowell has translated many modern and contemporary South American authors, including Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, Álvaro Bisama and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among others. - (Penguin Putnam)

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Booklist Reviews

Schweblin's first novel tells a frenetic, unnerving tale. A young mother, Amanda, is afflicted by a sudden illness and accepts that death is imminent. As she waits in her hospital bed, she hears the hovering voice of a young boy, David, who guides her as she recounts the events leading to her current dire situation. After arriving at a rural vacation home with her daughter, Nina, Amanda strikes up a friendship with their alluring neighbor, Carla, a local who is revealed to be David's mother. Carla shares with Amanda an unusual story about her son and her efforts to save him after he was poisoned. Amanda, at first dubious, becomes increasingly troubled by both mother and son and makes plans to cut their vacation short and return home. But things go awry when Amanda decides to bid Carla farewell. Schweblin's sparse narrative, both familiar and mysterious, quickly grows in intensity as the hazy whispers of self-doubt and death itself descend. A thought-provoking story that provides ample opportunity for readers to grapple with its unanswered questions. Copyright 2016 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

A taut, exquisite page-turner vibrating with existential distress and cumulative dread.Schweblin's English-language debut, translated by the eminently capable McDowell, plays out as a tense, sustained dialogue in an emergency clinic somewhere in the Argentinian countryside between a dying woman named Amanda and her dispassionate interlocutor, David, who, we quickly ascertain, is a child but seems to be neither her child nor any clear relation to her. At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, but as he pushes her to recall whatever trauma has landed her in her terminal state, a struggle for narrative control ensues. Though Amanda gradually gains the power to tell her story in her own way—despite David's frequent protestations that she's dwelling on irrelevant details that won't help her understand her circumstances—the impotence and inchoate dangers that underscore the conversation in the clinic ricochet throughout the larger story being told, of what brought her there and why David is with her. Even with the small freedom to tell the deathbed tale she wants to tell, she moves inexorably in the retelling toward the moment when death became inevitable, just as time, in the clinic, creeps closer to the realization of that death. While the book resides in the realm of the uncanny, its concerns are all too real. Once the top blows off Schweblin's chest of horrors, into which we'd been peeking through a masterfully manipulated crack, what remains is an unsettling and significant dissection of maternal love and fear, of the devastation we've left to the future, and of our inability to escape or control the unseen and unimagined threats all around us. In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future. Copyright Kirkus 2016 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

In her pulsating debut, Schweblin tells the story of Amanda, a young mother dying in a hospital, who talks to a neighborhood boy, David, as he sits by her bedside. David has Amanda recount the events leading up to her sudden illness—in search of, as he says, "the worms" that caused her ailment—and the result is a swirling narrative packed with dream logic and bizarre coincidences, where souls shift from sick bodies to healthy hosts and poisonous toxins seep under the skin upon contact with the grass. As Amanda and her daughter, Nina, try to settle in at their vacation home away from the city, they become entangled with Carla, David's mother, who appears at random intervals and spins wild tales of her son. After a frightening encounter with David, Amanda throws Carla and the boy out of her home, yet before long, the trio of women are reunited, and from her future hospital bed, a semilucid Amanda tries to remember how this meeting resulted in her death spiral. Powered by an unreliable narrator—is Amanda imagining David by her side?—Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill. (Jan.) Copyright 2016 Publisher Weekly.

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