The Anthill
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A wildly original blend of social horror and razor-sharp satire, The Anthill is a searing exploration of privilege, racism and redemption in the Instagram age.
In the end, it's much easier to not look at the screaming feeling. To not examine it. Better to just keep on rushing on. . . .
Lina has come home to the country of her childhood. Sent away from Colombia to England after her mother's death twenty years before, she's searching for the one person who can tell her about their shared past. She's never forgotten Matty--her childhood friend and protector who now runs The Anthill, a daycare refuge for the street kids of Medellín. Lina begins volunteering there, but her reunion with Matty is not what she hoped for. She no longer recognizes Medellín, now rebranded as a tourist destination, nor the person Matty has become: a guarded man uninterested in reliving the past she thought they both cherished.
As Lina begins to confront her memories and the country's traumatic history, strange happenings start taking place at The Anthill: something is violently scratching at the inside of the closet door, the kids are drawing unsettling pictures, and there are mysterious sightings of a small, dirty boy with pointy teeth. Is this a vision of the boy Lina once knew, or something more sinister? Did she bring these disturbances with her? And what will her search for atonement cost Matty?
A visceral, hallucinatory ride by an author who has been called "blunt, fresh and unsentimental" (The New York Times Book Review) and "remarkably inventive" (The Atlantic), The Anthill is a ghost story unlike any other, a meditation on healing--for both a person and a country--in the wake of horror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Pachico's uneven sophomore effort (after The Lucky Ones), 28-year-old half-Colombian and half-British Maria "Lina" Carolina returns to her birthplace of Medell n, Colombia, for the first time in 20 years. Anxious and aimless, she has left behind a foundering academic career in England to volunteer at The Anthill, a school founded by Matt as ("Matty"), whom Lina's mother had raised with Lina in Colombia. After a disarming initial reunion with Matty, who is scarred and embittered by his experiences in the city when it was more dangerous ("You won't be able to recognise who was once a guerilla or who was once a paramilitary," he tells her), Lina makes friends with the school's other volunteers and grows close to the children. However, as Matty tells the other volunteers a different version of his childhood story from the one Lina remembers, Lina is disturbed by the children's sightings of a strange, dirty boy who vanishes whenever Lina turns to look at him. While plot inconsistencies, underdeveloped characters, and awkward second-person narration lessen the narrative's emotional impact, Pachico navigates issues of class, war, and violence with intelligence and grace. This lopsided tale falls somewhere between literary fiction and commercial mystery without quite finding its footing.
