The Saint (“La Santita”) is an opening of cosmopoetic worlds in which the frontiers between body and spirit, culture and nature, feminine and masculine, playful and rational, science and magic fade away. In seven stories, the author organises universes in which mangroves, chickens, volcanic rocks, ashes, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Cristal meet and weave links that bring into play the existence of other realities (not necessarily Western) that escape the limits of time and space and the living and the dead. Inspired by the cosmologies of the Andean world and its deep violences, Moscoso makes magic with words, invents rhythms and brings references from popular culture together with another ancestral pop culture.

A puzzle of references so recognisable in Moscoso’s imaginary and in so many places in America. Posters of Chayanne and Hello Kitty among precarious dwellings, random vegetation, empty lots, houses made of unpainted and unplastered bricks, endless cities and buildings that shine in the sun, the smell of fried food and coriander. Neon and cumbia. Virgins and Star Wars. We are, perhaps, facing a literature of the end of the world.

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.

The story begins with the tragic murder of a father and his daughter in a small town in modern-day Paraguay, a case assigned to two local policemen. It alternates with flashbacks that take us to the origins of the unmatched instrument, signed by the luthier Antonio Stradivari in 1737. From then on we see it pass from hand to hand across Europe until it falls into the grasp of a Nazi official who ends his days in Latin America. Each time and place is recreated with just the right blend of information and emotion, intimacy and atmosphere, historical figures interacting with fictional characters, all caught up in the centuries-long intrigue of which the instrument is the axis. The Mystery of the Last Stradivarius (“El misterio del último Stradivarius”) invites readers to embark on an exciting journey between the inherent laws of the detective genre and following a historical thread through the depths of the souls of those who have owned the instrument. The violin also functions as an amulet, a powerful object believed to protect its possessor from all harm. The sublime music it produces puts its listeners in direct contact with a supernatural dimension, highlighting the transcendence of art.

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.

A she-wolf who wants to be free, but can she survive without her pack? Lucy wants to escape from the territory of her father, a powerful and fearsome politician, who is also a prominent organized crime boss in northern Mexico. Her attempt to escape does not follow a well-defined plan, which is why she is captured by Treviño, one of her father’s faithful henchmen. But Lucy does not give up, even if in her escape she loses almost everything: her comfortable life, her handful of friends, her lovers, her bodyguard… Everything, except her gun. But this is only the beginning: in her tender years she will get to know degradation, death, misery, perhaps incest. Maybe her vague hope of escape will not come true. Maybe her wolf-pack is bigger than she imagines. Maybe there is no escape. But Lucy is nothing if not determined, and all her experiences give her new strength to take on whatever may happen.

She-Wolf (“Loba”) is a fast-paced and dizzying novel about the abysses of the human soul and Mexican society today, a novel that by its unlikely extremes gives you the most unexpected and clearest insights, and with a long-lasting reverberation in the reader’s mind.

Monterrey, north Mexico: By the side of the powerful drugs lord Julio, the student Fernanda lives an extravagant life: parties, sex, and plenty of money. In return she devotes herself unconditionally to her man, with a love that is to change to its cruel opposite when Julio is no longer the one Fernanda used to know.

Fernanda is a young woman who has everything and yet, haunted by her own past and the lack of control over her own life as the lover of a narcotics boss, she descends into a downward spiral of dependence and violence. Brave Bitch (“Perra Brava”) is a fast-paced, powerful novel, in which glamour, wealth and beauty are mere facades of corrupt Mexican society.

Durruti is a feared and respected figure in the criminal underworld. His business involves stolen cars, dismantling them and selling their parts, and other related activities, typical of his field. But above all, his business is keeping order: ensuring that no one does anything he doesn’t approve of, that the police and the political authorities, with whom he has a cast-iron pact, are not forced to overact and break the criminal harmony by actions that aren’t part of the script. It isn’t easy to keep everyone in line. It would only take one spark in the wrong place at the wrong time to upset the balance.
Life unfolds. A man is jealous of his wife and follows her with unexpected consequences. A mother is happy about her daughter’s promotion, unaware that she isn’t exactly working as a secretary in that sought-after downtown apartment. Her sister always wanted her to learn her spiritual wisdom from her; who knows, it might have saved the young woman.
The spark ignites; that disturbance, slowly, precipitates others; each one greater than the last. The younger foot-soldiers murmur and stop following orders; the neighbourhood becomes unsettled; outbursts and improvisation take over. The spiral of violence expands and encircles them all. Suspicion replaces secrecy and respect; the old order is shaken, waiting for a new one to arrive, and this is not necessarily good news.
In Scrapyard (“Desarmadero”), Eugenia Almeida makes full use of the codes of the noir series to construct a storyline where corruption and crime reach all layers of society. With terse writing and an extraordinary mastery of the oral register, she tells a great story based on small events that produce uncontrollable consequences. Its plot could be set in any Argentinean city, its characters scrambling to escape the abyss that opens up before them.
The final sentence sounds both consoling and optimistic: “I am going to help you”. But in reality, it condemns the poor devil to whom it is addressed to never again being free in his life, as had happened to Durruti because of his love for his little brother, the Nene, and as will happen to everyone because the system is bigger than all of them.

A personal alphabet that aims to find the meaning of writing in a cluster of stories that connect with her life through secret passages. This is the form that Eugenia Almeida gives Flooding. The Secret Language We Are Made Of (“Inundación. El lenguaje secreto del que estamos hechos”), a book that crosses genres, dragging and revealing traces of experience, strands of stored emotions, voices, absences, desires.
The author writes Flooding as a long, wide-ranging letter, at a solitary fair, to a recipient who Almeida herself postulates, consolidates and enchants in their existence, with the passionate commitment of “that function of the species”, which is language. The pleasures and displeasures of an act of writing that is done “with the whole body”.

Eugenia Almeida’s superbly written crime novel Threshold Tension (“La tensión del umbral”) is both a gripping story and an astute study of human behaviour.

Guyot, a brilliant but headstrong journalist with a tragic personal history, becomes obsessed with the suicide of a woman whose motives for killing herself seem connected to past events: a series of alleged murders and suicides relating to a highly feared criminal in league with the military. But what really happened? And how is Julia, the suicide victim, connected to those events? As Guyot digs deeper, the dark secrets about the desaparecidos begin to surface. At the same time more and more of those he involves in the case end up dead or injured. When his new lady friend Vera is threatened, Guyot has to make a painful decision.

Written in refreshingly straightforward language, this novel keeps the reader’s attention with its strong characters and the sheer force of its carefully constructed storyline.

The Room at the Back (“La pieza del fondo”) tells the quiet and tender story of a group of people who live on the edge of society and are still able to show solidarity to each other, in spite of pain and loneliness. An old and dishevelled man sits on the same bench every day, unmoving and silent. Only Sofía, a harassed waitress in a run-down bar, tries to help. When he disappears, a whole set of parallel events are set in motion.

The Bus (“El colectivo”): A small town in the Argentinean provinces. A bar, where an unknown couple are waiting for the bus. As are Marta and Antonio Ponce, whose sister wants to depart. Clouds are drawing close in the sky, without bringing rain, as always. But something peculiar happens: The barriers of the railway crossing, abandoned long ago, are lowered and the bus roars past the bar without stopping. No one can leave the little town.

The Ponces have lived here for 32 years – as a wealthy lawyer, Antonio, seemingly on the wrong side of the rails, in the poor quarter. At the time, Marta became pregnant and Ponce felt obliged to ask for her hand in marriage. When she lost the child, it seemed too late to him to cancel the wedding. But she hadn’t even wanted to marry him and confessed she had only given in to him that night out of pity. This he never forgave her. He sought revenge by forcing her to a monotonous life at his side.

The accelerating bus turns into a spectacle, drawing in larger crowds every night. Confusion prevails, only the lovers make their way on foot along the rails. In the meantime, at the small police station, incidents follow in quick succession. Orders are now given by the military and at dead of night it comes to a shootout on the railway tracks. The next morning, the barriers are lifted; the Ponces are once more on their way to the bar, for once again, the bus stops for the passengers. At last it rains. The newspapers report the death of two dissidents. Who could ever be able to recognise the couple from the bar on the blurry photograph?

In sober prose, the author draws on her diffuse childhood memories of the dictatorship, to tell of internal and external suppression and its fatal consequences.

In her novel Sisters (“Hermanas”), which draws on autobiographical elements, Gisela Antonuccio tells the story of two unequal sisters in Argentina at the turn of the millennium. Vanesa is the adopted daughter of a middle-class Italian couple. When she is three years old, the couple has a biological daughter, Lorena, who not only suffers from various health problems but also turns out to be the more challenging child in other aspects. The older sister, very obedient and rule-oriented, soon becomes the true caretaker and educator of Lore, as both parents spend their days away from home in pursuit of prosperity for the family. This tightens the bond between the sisters. However, when Lore reaches puberty, conflicts erupt, and Vanesa finds herself powerless against her sister’s verbal and physical attacks. The question of her own identity increasingly takes center stage. Vanesa leaves for Italy with a scholarship in search of her roots, while Lore deviates further from the path and even seeks treatment multiple times for her drug addiction. Despite all their outward distance, the sisters remain connected and ultimately reunite in a consolidated relationship, with the possibility of newfound happiness.

Antonuccio narrates this poignant story, written in concise prose, from the immediate perspective of experience. In brief chapters, she immerses Vanesa into the recalled scenes, giving them intense presence and significant psychological authenticity. The conflict with her sister and the feeling of being lost evolve into existential questions about one’s place in the world.

Sisters is the construction of two possibilities of being in a story, of the bifurcation of paths to find each other again, of love, finally, unconditional. With concise and forceful prose, Gisela Antonuccio creates a moving story of surrender, forgiveness and roots.

With her refreshing comments on younger women’s conflicts in the era of e-mails, text messages and Facebook, Ofelia is the new heroine of the comic strip. In nine small images per page she tells us a whole story: Be it lovesickness, self-esteem or the imponderable ways of life, Ofelia will surprise us and make us laugh with her very real existential dilemmas and her audacious vision of herself and the world around her.

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…