Straddling the testimonial narrative and essay, The Hangover of Memory (“La resaca de la memoria”) tells the story of a character referred to as “I.” An “I” in the third person who, belonging to the second generation of Chile’s dictatorship, is permeated by the memories of others and by the traces of a receding memory. The book’s title, The Hangover of Memory, reflects this phenomenon and points to the double meaning of the word “hangover”: the debris left behind by ocean waves, and the malaise one wakes up with (or, in this case, is born into) the day after intoxication.
The daughter of survivors who sought refuge in Mexico, “I” extends the exile in France, as if fleeing a tragic family destiny. Indeed, “I” is also the niece of Miguel Estay, alias El Fanta: one of the most emblematic and controversial perpetrators of the dictatorial period. Sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, this former left-wing militant betrayed dozens of members of the Communist Party, and ultimately participated voluntarily in one of the most atrocious crimes of that era, the so-called “Case of the Throats Slashed.”
“I,” the daughter of victims, explores the remnants of imprisonment, torture, and exile clinging to her skin, trying to identify everything that binds her to the other “stragglers of memory” of her generation. “I,” the perpetrator’s niece, delves into that other grim zone of History, asking what part of that legacy belongs to her and how to confront it from an ethical and political standpoint. In search of her family past, the character thus embarks on an adventure: she returns to Chile, joins the 2019 social uprising, meets other descendants of genocidaires, co-founds a collective with them, encounters some of her uncle’s victims, and discovers the existence of an unknown cousin—the daughter of the perpetrator.
To invent one’s own narrative amid secrets, distortions, lies, and unbearable truths: such is the challenge she is confronted with—a challenge as immense as the price to be paid.

A country in the throes of dictatorship, a repressive group operating in the shadows: torture, murder, disappearances, clandestine detention centres. And a young soldier, Andrés Valenzuela. Papudo, his village. “Papudo”, his nickname. A young soldier who gradually descended into hell.
One morning, he decides to ‘tell everything, spit it all out, down to the last detail. Even if they come after me. Even if they kill me for deserting.’ ‘It doesn’t really matter: you’re already dead. They stole your soul.’
Andrés Valenzuela was the only agent who, while on active duty, deserted after handing over information to the Vicariate of Solidarity about the structure and extermination practices implemented by the secret organisation of which he was a member. Here is the story of a living dead man. And what happened before: a humble childhood, dreams and fantasies, friends from the neighbourhood, a fisherman father. And what happened after: the strangeness of exile, clandestinity, heartbreak, guilt – always guilt. Many journalists, writers, and filmmakers have endeavoured to tell the story of Papudo, the torturer; Papudo, the murderer; Papudo, the penitent. The story of Papudo, the man, is now told by him.

This book gives voice to Andrés Valenzuela, a deserter from the Air Force Intelligence Service and former operative agent of the Joint Command during the Pinochet dictatorship. Assuming the paradox of someone else’s autobiography, it collects his last and longest testimony, sealed by a letter in his own handwriting. Why did you break down? Why at that moment and not before? Why you and not others?
From Papudo to Hell. Autobiography of Andrés Valenzuela Morales (“De Papudo al infierno. Autobiografía de Andrés Valenzuela Morales”) raises these and other questions.

In Queen of the Tamarugal (“Reina del Tamarugal”), once a year, when the Virgin of Carmen sets out to travel across her pampas, the town of La Tirana fills with pilgrims who dance for her and followers who celebrate her with devotion.
Fran, a woman in her thirties, arrives from the city to film a documentary about this religious festival. She uses the trip as a way to distance herself from the mounting pressure of organizing her wedding.
Cristi, a local teenager, turns her grandmother’s house into a parallel celebration with her friends — reggaeton, drugs, and alcohol — running alongside the town’s ecstatic festivities.
Fran’s melancholic gaze — and her camera — capture the faces, costumes, and fervour of the dancers, while Cristi’s frustration with her boyfriend, who flirts with drug trafficking, disrupts the fragile, unseen balance beneath the crowd, the music, and the folklore.
Malu Furche R., with her clear and visual prose, tells a story for the digital age: two voices that almost never meet but watch, follow, and affect each other without knowing it. In this, her debut novel, she opens the desert to two women who seek silence as an escape from pressure.

Heat Islands (“Islas de calor”) unfolds in a world where the climate crisis has spiralled out of control. Rising temperatures have reshaped societies and forced humanity into a radically new way of life: water is a treasure, shade a salvation, night the new day, and daylight a forbidden space under military curfew.
Within this chaotic landscape, certain areas where concrete and buildings trap heat become literal “heat islands.” Like the stories in this collection, they contain the isolation and abandonment of those who suffer, the desperate attempts of people to find relief, and the cold opportunism of those willing to exploit others to survive. As the city’s fragments shift and burn in this man-made inferno, a spontaneous fire climbs the hill to the statue of the Virgin, stirring a sense of superstition and awe.
In her debut short story collection, written in sharp and vivid prose, Malu Furche R. envisions a world on the brink—one that refuses to end quietly, as its inhabitants continue to adapt even to a universal catastrophe.

At the cost of losing his freedom, a man goes to the police to confess to a murder, whose victim, he claims, is hidden in the heart of the Atacama desert. From there, a whirlwind of unexpected events begins that will captivate the reader. Detectives who are working against time and an average citizen whose motives for turning himself in are unknown. The desert as a silent witness to a chilling event.
Once again, Carlos Pinto delves into his characters’ psyche to explore those dark labyrinths where the beast that sleeps in each of us resides. The Path of the Beasts (“El camino de las bestias”) is inspired by real events and suggests that this animality could surface in any of us, when we least expect it.

A medical student performing clandestine abortions becomes involved in the death of a pregnant young woman who dies during one of his procedures. When accused of stealing supplies from his university, he takes advantage of this minor offense to spend a brief period in prison, thus avoiding investigation into the young woman’s death. Ignoring his warnings, his girlfriend decides to continue the macabre business despite her lack of knowledge.
Veteran detective Facundo Pineda becomes the main threat to the couple due to his persistence and intuition, insisting on finding the links between two very different incidents that will bring him closer to the truth. But what initially seems like just another case in his career turns into a real nightmare, threatening to drag down those around him.
In The Garden of the Innocents (“El jardín de los inocentes”), journalist Carlos Pinto draws inspiration from a dramatic real case to unveil the dark secrets of two individuals that, after making poor decisions, cross the limits of ethics, morality, and legality.

The Silence of the Damned (“El silencio de los malditos”) is based on a real case. A journalist gains access to a dangerous convict who no one has ever managed to interview before. In a cramped interrogation room inside the prison, he starts to tell a story that goes beyond a confession and becomes a one-way journey into the inscrutable dominion of a criminal mind. The man has committed a horrendous murder, without any apparent cause, but it unveils a life of deprivation, pain, and revenge. Carlos Pinto applies his mastery to literature in order to descend into the depths of hell that are the human condition. It’s a striking first novel.

Ummi (“Ummi. Una historia de la migración palestina”) is an Arabic word which translates as “my mama”. Baboun has chosen to follow her Ummi as she reconstructs her family’s memory, moving freely between memory, chronicle and biography. Her recollections go back to Palestine, her ancestors’ decision to escape, and the struggle to build a new life in distant South America. Baboun lets her own Palestinian, Greek, and Chilean roots transform her novelistic style, using this research as a starting point to navigate the discovery of family secrets and stories. The book is also the story of the author trying to find her own cultural identity in Chile, the country with the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East. Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, Isabel Baboun has written with masterclass a book that is as moving as it is unique.

In her novel The Thai Woman (“La tailandesa”), Baboun presents us with Diana, a woman in her forties, at the verge of a turning point of her life. She feels trapped in both her private and professional life, not really connected to nobody and not even to herself and her body. She feels betrayed by Maxi, the man with whom she is living in the same apartment, and by Nancy, her supposed best friend, who snatched a role offer from under her nose and is now the TV starlet she could have been, instead of remaining a teacher at the high school where she has already studied herself. Thai boxing gives her a kick, a glimpse of self-empowerment. But only acting on stage enables her – herself and Moisés, Nancy’s little son with whom Diana “rehearses” a borrowed motherhood – to take a break from reality and to really feel free, to follow only herself without any outer rules, and to be who she really is.
Like Mieko Kawakami, Baboun creates protagonists representing the contemporary woman, delving into different aspects of femininity and maternity, in an always entertaining, witty style and a highly original language. The Thai Woman is a feminist novel of archaic force.

The novel Kid (“Cría”) focuses on the relationship between the narrator Zina and her parents, whose influence she believes she has escaped from in recent years. Zina lives in a small town in southern Chile with Joan, an older American woman, while she pretends to her parents that she is based in California. Her father has repeatedly beaten his wife and daughter and bullied them, and her mother, otherwise self-confident and fun-loving, has never managed to free herself from this situation. When she asks Zina to come home urgently because her father has to undergo heart surgery and could die, Joan encourages Zina to go along with the request, but not to regard it as a return home as her mother would like, but merely as a temporary visit. Zina agrees, but feels an anxiety settle on her chest, a shadow that reminds her of the gloom of her parents’ home. When Zina arrives in Santiago, she is caught up in the margins of the social unrest that shakes Chile in autumn 2019, in particular its capital city after the brutal deployment of security forces on 18 October. These events reflect her father’s violence, from which there also seems to be little escape. Her parents’ influence is revealed to be fully intact when her father’s heart surgery leads to complications that require a partial lung transplant. Ever the good daughter, Zina follows her mother’s pleas to help her father, and her spirit of resistance only stirs when she is being prepared for her own operation and the anaesthesia begins to take effect…

Calbuco, a title that takes up the name of the small island in southern Chile where the author grew up, is an epistolary novel composed of letters that Romina Pistolas addresses to figures from her past and present, people who have marked her life and whose memory returns to question her. In these intertwined voices, a portrait emerges of a town where patriarchy and gender abuse predominate, but where networks of solidarity are also forged between women who resist and accompany each other.
The work reflects on memory, sisterhood and the traumas inherited from generation to generation, while portraying the experiences of the province and the ways of inhabiting deep Chile. With an agile and beautiful prose, Romina Pistolas weaves communicating vessels between the intimate and the collective, between the written life and the lived life, confirming the strength of an author who bursts forth with a clear and singular voice.

“My first day as a stripper wasn’t much different from the first day of school. On both occasions, I pretended to be braver than I really was.” This is the existential gamble of Romina, the protagonist of this story: to act with a courage that isn’t there until it is obtained.
Carmen, or How I Got into the Industry of Dancing Naked (»Carmen. O cómo me inicié en el negocio de bailar sin ropa«) is a novel about daring, in spite of fear. The fear of leaving home, the familiar, the safe, the solid ground. And yet, having the courage to step through the door into the unknown; traveling to the other side of the world to start over, discovering friends where they weren’t expected. The courage to dive into the water, fully clothed, to reach the other shore, to get, somehow, to the other side.
With a fresh voice, agile prose, and a lot of humour, through this autofiction, Romina Pistolas tells us in the first person of an experience rarely seen in literature: how she started in the business of dancing without clothes.

For a short time, Víctor holds in his hands “the future of the Society of the Free”, a metallic cube where the only copy of the network containing the data of Neurón, a parallel society that tries to escape the oppressive power of the state, is kept. But Nivia has betrayed him. His partner is actually an agent and has set him up. In Bed 32 (“Cama 32”) Víctor is pursued, captured, tortured. But he no longer carries the cube in his hand, for now Víctor has become Neurón. Within his consciousness, irreversibly attached to his thoughts and even his most intimate memories, Neurón is hidden. And from his damaged body the information that keeps the Neurón network and the Society of the Free alive is transmitted. For the resistance, Víctor becomes a saviour figure. Mila, whom he once loved but from whom he had to distance himself for security reasons, does everything she can to save him. Will Neurón perish or can the network survive, and with it hope?
In his fiercely written novel, Quercia depicts a dystopian world from the point of view of the characters who live in it. He is primarily interested in their behaviour under what they perceive as a normal state of surveillance. In a world that has features of our present, but also harks back to the military dictatorships of the last century.

In The Dreams That Are Left (“Electrocante”), Natalio, a Class 5, the City’s most despised cops, responsible for quietly eliminating dissidents, needs to get a new ‘electrocant’, a human-looking robot that serves as his assistant. Short of money, he makes do with an old, low-quality model that quickly distinguishes itself by the disturbing strangeness of its expressions and reactions. But Natalio has no time to ponder these anomalies: he has a new case to solve. He has been contacted by Special Dreams, the huge virtual reality company in which millions of the City’s inhabitants take refuge from their miserable lives, encapsulated in impossible dreams. An imposter is selling spaces using stolen identities. While some fiercely oppose this disturbing business venture, others would give anything to gain access. The investigation turns dangerous and reveals a conspiracy beyond its possibilities, in which the robot is a key component.

Santiago Quiñones is at his wit‘s end. His fiancée Marina does not love him anymore. Is it because he had too many other women, even without ever having loved anyone other than Marina? His police colleagues despise him. Is it because he had an affair with his boss’s wife, and this boss is now after him? And he‘s gnawed by guilt ever since he helped his seriously ill stepfather to die. Is it because he grew up without a father? One night, Santiago falls on a small-time drug dealer and makes a silly mistake. This misstep will not be long in catching up with him… In The Blood Is Not Water (“La sangre no es agua”, French title: “The Legend of Santiago”), Boris Quercia shows us his villainous policeman Santiago Quiñones in a new adventure, endowed with a sense of honour as twisted as it is solid.

Dead Dog (“Perro muerto”) is Santiago Quiñones’s second case. He has experience in the detective trade: he has faced several shootings and avid delinquents. However, when he believed he had seen everything, in a bloody battle, Jiménez, his companion, is fatally wounded. Worse still, the deceased seems to have been mixed up with some murky stories, and had internal affairs on his back. Out of curiosity as much as idleness, Santiago begins to investigate, and he finds a young woman he knows well. Yesenia lives only to avenge herself for having been kidnapped and raped by her father-in-law. In the name of their past friendship she asks Santiago to kill this man. He is plunged into a crisis: he wants a normal life, he wants to spend some days off at the seaside with his girlfriend Marina, with whom things have been difficult recently – but even if he tries, he cannot get away from his problems. It is in this oppressive atmosphere that a clue leads Santiago to the true reasons for the death of his friend, and triggers a delirious adventure in the toughest districts of Santiago. Once again, it’s the tone of the novel and the complex character of the main figure – who loves his girlfriend but wants to try other women as well, who is not always politically correct but is a moral person who in the end is going to do the right thing – that inevitably draws the reader into its spell.

In Santiago Quiñones, Cop (“Santiago Quiñones, tira”) it’s cold, it’s six in the morning and Santiago does not want to kill anyone. The problem is that he’s a cop. A cop in Santiago de Chile. And he is about to arrest a band of dangerous but inexperienced and unpredictable delinquents… After killing a fifteen-year-old young man during a difficult arrest, Santiago wanders through the streets of his city, filled with disgust. This is how his path crosses with that of beautiful Ema Marín, a woman so seductive that she will entangle him in a dark scam. Ema is an insurance broker who seems to know a lot about the cop’s past, and the reader learns that he doesn’t have an altogether clean slate… The police story goes deeper and deeper into the city’s underworld, where the force of events is incontestable and any possible dream is dashed. The attraction to women and sex at the heart of the story will lead the reader on unsuspected and strangely tragicomic paths, creating a highly original atmosphere and tone.