The Accidentals

From the International Booker–shortlisted author of Still Born, a powerful collection of stories about characters coping with estrangement, isolation, and the unknown.

 

Acclaimed for her piercing insights and razor-sharp prose, award-winning author Guadalupe Nettel introduces us to eight characters who are each in their own way lost and wandering, struggling to connect with the people around them.

In “Imprinting,” Nettel shows us a young woman finding an unexpected affinity with an estranged uncle, whose exile from the family is too deep a secret for his niece to know. She introduces us, in “Life Elsewhere,” to a frustrated actor who begins, without realizing it, to take over the life and house of a more successful former colleague. And in “The Torpor,” we meet a woman who lives with her children in a dying world where it is better to be asleep than awake.

With her signature bold, stark style of writing that makes her work “a revelation” (Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies), this stunning collection interrogates humanity’s struggle to communicate and reveals the universal longing for connection.