The Accidentals

(Paperback)

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When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man's desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences. Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical,The Accidentalsis the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.

Reviews

Guadalupe Nettel yet again walks into uncertain terrain with these mysterious stories. There are secrets everywhere, she says, especially in lifes most intimate and familiar aspects.The Accidentalsnever loses its sense of things being out of joint, and Nettel explores these fears with calm and with beauty.
Mariana Enrquez, author ofOur Share of Night

I adored this collection, it spread its roots out within me. Nettel is an extraordinary writer.
Daisy Johnson, author ofThe Hotel

The Accidentalsis a striking and compelling collection that searches for the extraordinary within the ordinary. Each narrative veers seamlessly from the mundane to the existential; the writing is deft, and unsettling prose imbues the work with a profound resonance. I loved these stories, madandcontrolled, and brilliant.
Elaine Feeney, author ofAll the Good Things You Deserve

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

I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexicos greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused 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 in the world. An essential voice of the new Latin American literature.
Enrique Vila-Matas, author ofMacs Problem

Slyly inventive and delightfully disquieting,The Accidentalsis an incredible story collection filled with worlds both deceptively familiar and wondrously strange. A master of the form, Nettel draws each of her universes with great precision. Each story delivers a deliciously effective and haunting sting youll remember long afterwards.
Gina Chung, author ofGreen Frog

The stories in The Accidentals move through a landscape that is both foreign and familiar, mysterious and menacing, dreamy and distraught, and I had the palpable sense that anything might happen next. It is the kind of book you read in a single afternoon, gladly relinquishing the cares of day-to-day life to sink into its otherworldly submersions.
Jessie Ren Marshall, author of Women! In! Peril!

Author Bio

Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international award winning novelsEl husped[The Guest] (2006),The Body Where I Was Born(2011),After the Winter(2014, Herralde Novel Prize) andStill Born(2020) and four 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 fifteen languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta,The White Review,El Pas, theNew York Times,La RepubblicaandLa Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City where she's the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de Mxico.

Rosalind Harvey is a literary translator and educator from Bristol and now based in Coventry in the West Midlands. She has translated writers such as Juan Pablo Villalobos, Elvira Navarro, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and her work has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, amongst others. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Arts Foundation Fellow, a committee member of the Translators Association, and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network.