Austral

"A multilayered exploration of ideas . . . [A] masterly voyage of discovery" New York Times

A tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive and our attempts to make sense of the past as well as the present. Carlos Fonseca has written a book that is like a beautiful maze where we can discover new treasures at each turn. -- Katharina Volckmer author of THE APPOINTMENT
Carlos Fonseca is one of today's most promising Latin American novelists, and Austral - a reflection on identity, rootlessness and violence, written in admirable prose - is his most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date. -- Javier Cercas author of Soldiers of Salamis
An exceptional and intricate novel of depth, insight and understanding, translated with great care by Megan McDowell. -- Declan O'Driscoll Irish Times
A multilayered exploration of ideas of belonging, language and erasure that moves from a snowy Ohio campus to the Amazonian jungle and northern Argentine desert . . . [A] masterly voyage of discovery, both physical and intellectual. -- Anderson Tepper New York Times
Chewy but not clotted, expansive and thought-provoking. -- John Self Guardian
A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative along side a meditation on memory, mystery and vanishing. Sebaldian in its turns, Austral is a novel of profound questions. -- Guy Gunaratne author of MISTER, MISTER
In Austral, Fonseca has created a profoundly literary project: to search for the traces of that journey of no return to who we used to be, and to leave a free and joyful record of his unexpected findings discoveries -- Alia Trabucco Zerán author of THE REMAINDER
The young Fonseca, who is someone who creates fictions about archives, masks and ruins, that is to say, someone who knows how to create other ways of thinking, and who is also usually a brilliant and obstinate explorer of abysses, has become one of my favourite writers. -- Enrique Vila-Matas
He makes his own the voice of the great metaphysicians of postmodern fiction. His Delphic, conspiratorial aura recalls the paranoid brilliance of Don DeLillo, the cosmopolitan dread of Roberto Bolaño and the imaginative elasticity of Ricardo Piglia. -- Dustin Illingworth New York Times Book Review
Fonseca conceives of fiction writing as a Borgesian garden of forking paths El periodico
The writing is meticulous, precise, nuanced when necessary, always attentive to the novel's changes of pace El País
A brilliant enquiry into the archive of memory El mundo

Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica in 1987, brought up in Puerto Rico and studied in the USA. He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogota 39 group (2016), by Granta magazine as one of the twenty-five best young Spanish-language writers (2021) and by Encyclopaedia Britannica as one of the twenty most promising writers in the world for their 'Young Shapers of the Future' (2022). His previous novels are Colonel Lagrimas and Natural History, both translated by Megan McDowell. His work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Greek, Turkish and Croatian. He is a lecturer at Cambridge University, where he is a fellow of Trinity College.

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