Fever Dream
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017
Tightly wound and full of dread, Fever Dream is a chilling tale of maternal love and environmental catastrophe, from an Argentinian literary star
'The book I wish I had written' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her.
She's not his mother. He's not her child.
At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological menace, Fever Dream is a modern classic. Samanta Schweblin's unforgettable debut is a prescient warning about our manipulation of the natural world, and an unforgettable exercise in literary suspense.
'A gloriously creepy fable' Guardian, 'Best Fiction of 2017'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her pulsating debut, Schweblin tells the story of Amanda, a young mother dying in a hospital, who talks to a neighborhood boy, David, as he sits by her bedside. David has Amanda recount the events leading up to her sudden illness in search of, as he says, "the worms" that caused her ailment and the result is a swirling narrative packed with dream logic and bizarre coincidences, where souls shift from sick bodies to healthy hosts and poisonous toxins seep under the skin upon contact with the grass. As Amanda and her daughter, Nina, try to settle in at their vacation home away from the city, they become entangled with Carla, David's mother, who appears at random intervals and spins wild tales of her son. After a frightening encounter with David, Amanda throws Carla and the boy out of her home, yet before long, the trio of women are reunited, and from her future hospital bed, a semilucid Amanda tries to remember how this meeting resulted in her death spiral. Powered by an unreliable narrator is Amanda imagining David by her side? Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill.
