Alia Trabucco Zerán

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER! From a global star and International Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp, unforgettable novel about a maid who’s seen too much and a family at a breaking point A young girl has died and the family’s maid is being interrogated. She must tell the whole story before arriving at the girl’s death. Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: “smart appearance, full time,” their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion as she grew up, the mother’s coldness, the father’s distance. She saw it all. After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.

A genre-bending feminist account of the lives and crimes of four women who committed the double transgression of murder, violating not only criminal law but also the invisible laws of gender. When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold analyzes four homicides carried out by Chilean women over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Alia Trabucco Zerán offers a nuanced close reading of their lives and crimes, foregoing sensationalism in favor of dissecting how all four were both perpetrators of grievous violent acts and victims of another, more insidious kind of violence. This radical retelling challenges the archetype of the woman murderer and reveals another narrative, one as disturbing and provocative as the transgressions themselves: What makes women lash out against the restraints of gendered domesticity, and how do we—readers, viewers, the media, the art world, the political establishment—treat them once they do? Expertly intertwining true crime, critical essay, and research diary, International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán (The Remainder), in a translation by Sophie Hughes (Hurricane Season), brings an overdue feminist perspective to the study of deviant women.

Santiago, Chile. The city is covered in ash. Three children of ex-militants are facing a past they can neither remember nor forget. Felipe sees dead bodies on every corner of the city, counting them up in an obsessive quest to square these figures with the official death toll. He is searching for the perfect zero, a life with no remainder. Iquela and Paloma, too, are searching for a way to live on. When the body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, the three take a hearse and a bottle of pisco up the cordillera for a road trip with a difference. Intense, intelligent, and extraordinarily sensitive to the shape and weight of words, this remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of a pain that stretches across generations.

Uno de los debuts más importantes del año según El País, llega uno de los libros más esperados, cuyos derechos ya se han vendido a trece países antes de su publicación en español. Estela deja a su madre en el sur para trabajar en la casa de una familia en Santiago de Chile y allí se queda los siguientes siete años, limpiando y criando a una niña acosada por la ansiedad, cuya muerte conocemos al comienzo de la novela. Como en una tragedia griega, la tensión crece con cada página, con cada personaje o elemento: la perra callejera, el veneno, la pistola, la confesión inconfesable del “señor”, la aparición de Carlos, hasta un desenlace tan poderoso como inevitable. Una novela excepcional donde todo el espesor reflexivo es contrapesado por una trama vertiginosa y una concatenación de hechos que refrenda lo que la propia Estela sabe advertir: que «hay muchas maneras de hablar. La voz es sólo la más sencilla».