Seven Empty Houses

Synopsis

Winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature, 2022

A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three-time International Booker Prize finalist, ‘lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.’ –O, the Oprah magazine

The world of Samanta Schweblin’s short stories is dark and destabilising. Here, home is not a place of safety but the site of hidden danger, silent menace, unspoken resentment. Picture-perfect doors and spotless windows conceal lives in disarray, slowly unraveling in the face of obsession and fear, jealousy and desire.

Unsettling, exhilarating and fiercely original, these prizewinning stories expose raw and uncomfortable truths about the people and places we think will keep us safe, and ask what happens when that promise proves empty.

‘Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious.’ New York Times Book Review

Author

Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections and two novels, which have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017, and her short-story collection Seven Empty Houses won the National Book Award for Translated Literature 2022. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.