Ways of Going Home

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Growing up in 1980s Chile, a young boy plays hide and seek in the suburbs of Santiago with his friends while the adults become slowly entangled in the brutality of Pinochet's regime accomplices and victims of the brutal dictatorship. As the country shudders under authoritarian rule, the boy creates stories of his own to explain the sporadic scenes of violence, the disappearances, and the deafening silence of his mother and father. Until, on the night of the Santiago earthquake, a mysterious girl named Claudia appears among the children and the boy's world is changed forever.

Now, as a young man reflecting on the tragedies of his childhood, he must find the courage to confront as an adult what he could not have known as a child, and to untangle Chile's troubled past. As he struggles to begin a novel which will encompass the clash between innocence and complicity, the boundaries between fiction and reality blur and the beautiful Claudia comes back into his life

Reviews

Zambra is one of the writers of my generation that I most admire. Never a wasted word. Never a false note. His is an utterly unique voice, one I go back to again and again -- Daniel Alarcn, author * Lost City Radio *
I've found myself rereading, trying to work out this short novel's intricate structure of gaps and holes -- Adam Thirlwell, Books of the Year * New Statesman *
Complex yet sophisticated, the novel places Zambra at the spearhead of a new Chilean fiction. [He] weaves some of the continent's most difficult historical themes into an exciting modern art form -- Mina Holland * Observer *
A brief, elegant novel of life and writing after Pinochet... Zambra cannot simply be pigeonholed as a "Spanish-Language" writer. His concerns and influences are broader, and [his writing] has a meditative, discursive timbre... Notable -- Adam ORiordan * Sunday Telegraph *
An achievement in pace, rhythm, and poetic restraint... With quietly disarming prose, Zambra captures the spirit of a people struggling inside themselves to tell - and, most of all, live - a better story -- Juan Vidal, 2013s Best Translated Novels * NPR *
Brilliant -- Adam Thirlwell, Books of the Year * TLS *
Deceptively slight and finely wrought: both a wistful look at Chile's recent political history and a metafictional reflection on the nature of writing... Zambra is one of Chile's finest writers -- Matt Lewis * Times Literary Supplement *
Manages, in its sparse, moving, constantly smoking cool-eyed Chilean way, to add up to a stark and timely study of fiction, truth, memory, secrets, sex, Pinochet and death... Wonderful -- Stuart Hammond * Dazed & Confused *
A fascinating reflection on historical complicity, translated with restrained elegance by Megan McDowell -- David Evans * Financial Times *
A thrilling novel from one of Chile's outstanding young writers... Zambra's tightly crafted work explores the themes of childhood, disappointment, and the impossibility of ever returning home -- Angel Gurria-Quintana * Financial Times *
A work which is filled with the heartfelt vulnerability of testimony. I loved it and I read it with the great joy of anticipation that one has reading a writer one hopes to read more and more of in the future -- Edwidge Danticat
Thought-provoking and inspiring... a captivating book -- Abi Jackson * Manchester Evening News *
Zambra belongs to that rare species of writers that bring language back to life. The strength of this novel, its potency, is in the way it unfolds language in order to place its readers at that almost ungraspable intersection between individual and collective history -- Valeria Luiselli
Zambra mixes fiction with reality... a brief but brilliant coming of age novel -- Thomas Quinn * Big Issue *
Thought-provoking and inspiring, the book also echoes some of the author's own nostalgia of growing up during that turbulent time... Captivating * Yorkshire Post *
Zambra at his best offers an intimate recognition of his central characters, and he can evoke a setting succinctly -- Richard Gwyn * Independent *
Brilliant * Colourlines *

Author Bio

Alejandro Zambra is the author of the poetry collections Bahia inutil and Mudanza, the novels Bonsai, which won the Critics Prize and the National Council Prize for Books for the best novel of the year, La vida privada de los arboles (The Private Lives of Trees) and the book of essays No leer (2010). Ways of Going Home was the winner of the Altazor Prize and the Consejo Nacional del Libro Prize, both for the best 2011 Chilean novel. He lives in Santiago and is a literature professor at the University Diego Portales.