Still Born

(Paperback)

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Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.



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 has taken the drastic decision to be sterilized, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth - after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite - and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions.

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.

Reviews

'Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature. ... I envy how naturally she makes use oflanguage; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profoundand penetrating knowledge of human nature.'- Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

'I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico's greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, alwayssuffused with sensuality and strange science.'- Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast

'Nettel is free. She has succeeded in creating an audacious narrative style all her own, a singular and fearless way of being inthe world. An essential voice of the new Latin American literature.'- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac's Problem

Author Bio

Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico in 1973 and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international-award winning novels El husped (2006), The Body Where I was Born (2011), After the Winter (2014, Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born (2020) and three collections of short stories, all published by Anagrama, the most prestigious of all Spanish-language publishing houses. Her work has been translated into more than ten languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, El Pas, the New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City where she's the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de Mxico.