Things We Lost in the Fire
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
'A portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades' Guardian
Thrilling and terrifying, Things We Lost in the Fire takes the reader into a world of sharp-toothed children and young girls racked by desire, where demons lurk beneath the river and stolen skulls litter the pavements. A world where the secrets half-buried under Argentina's terrible dictatorship rise up to haunt the present day, and where women, exhausted by a plague of violence, find that their only path out lies through the flames...
'The only book that's ever left me afraid to turn out the lights. Mercilessly incisive and deeply creepy' Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Morbid tales of contemporary Argentina animate Enriquez's memorable collection of short fiction. In "The Dirty Kid," a privileged woman comes to believe that the homeless boy who lives outside her building has been the victim of a beheading, only to later learn that his fate is much more complicated. A young girl inexplicably disappears into an abandoned home, never to be seen again, in "Adela's House," while a broken-down car causes a tenuous marriage to disintegrate in "Spiderweb." At their best, stories such as "An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt" recall Stephen King at his most literary, grounding supernatural horror allegories in a detailed realist tableau. But even the weaker sections convey the singular strangeness of life as a woman in Argentina, where instability seems to haunt every facet of existence the electricity, the currency, the concept of family and sudden, otherworldly violence is always at one's doorstep. Enriquez's debut collection is elevated by its vivid locale and its deft inclusion of genre sensibilities.
