A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALIST

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner

"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling eventsin this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life fromColombian writer Quintana (TheBitch). Readers will be dazzled." -Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of family life, and Claudia's world starts falling apart. In this strikingly vivid portrait of Cali, Colombia, Claudia's acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them. In Abyss, Quintana leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment.

Praise for Pilar Quintana

Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn't know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them. YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

How can I sum up everything that fascinates me about Pilar Quintana. Her incredible lyricism. Her path against the unexpected. The tensionrazor-sharp, poetic and uncompromising.SARA MESA

Pilar Quintana is pure literature. LARA MORENO

Quintana has an impressive ability to tell truly deep stories that outwardly appear quite simple. Precise and concrete, her characters so human it's impossible not to empathize with them. SARA JARAMILLO KLINKERT

Praise for Abyss

The Bitch distills entire social, ethical, and cultural universes into a potent short novel, thanks to Pilar Quintana's remarkable eye for detail and Lisa Dillman's spare yet stirring translation. Set in a coastal town in Colombia, this novel is populated by complex characters outlined with minimalist strokes of absolute precision, and offers a startling, profound portrait of frustrated desire that will stay with the reader for a long time to come. JURY, National Book Awards (USA)

Set on Colombia's Pacific coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in the narration until the very end. World Translations Review

Pilar Quintana's novella manages to tackle, with the lightest of touches, a striking range of profound themes, from poverty and class inequality to loneliness, loss and repentance. This is a wonderfully nuanced meditation on family ties and society's demands, and the central relationship between Damaris and Rogelio is both touchingly tender and grittily believable. New Internationalist

What are the abysses that a girl, stunned by the mysteries of her family and the world, peers into? Her apartment is a jungle, her home a supermarket, her country a fog-enclosed mountain range obscuring the cliffs. Readers too fall, stunned, into Pilar Quintana's abyss. HÉCTOR ABAD

Pilar Quintana has created a powerful story that contrasts with the hopeless and doomed atmosphere that surrounds the protagonist. In subtle and brilliant prose, in which nature connects us with the symbolic possibilities of literature, the abysses are both real and intimate. JURY, Alfaguara Novel Prize 2021

In a powerful, unsettling voice, Pilar Quintana explores the fears of childhood alongside the fragility and violence of adults. With lucidity, innocence, suspense and the labyrinths of desire, she draws an unforgettable map of the heartrending road to freedom. IRENE VALLEJO

A voice of strength, one that takes us to the world of a young girl confronting adult reality from a visionary childhood, a truly important voice that resides in each of us and makes this novel so moving. Abyss is Pilar Quintana's triple jump. ANA MERINO

A work built around small details that can define an entire continent. Vogue

A novel about women condemned to unfulfilled lives that avoids oversimplification through the opacity of its protagonist and the lovable, almost naive tone, which nonetheless fills the narrator's gaze with pain. Babelia

In Abyss, something is on the verge of snapping, a rope being pulled by social impositions at one end and the protagonists' true desires at the other, dangerous as a jungle. InfoLibre

Literature should speak to the universal, the human. Abyss speaks to questions that will intrigue any reader, anywhere in the world. Beneath its dialogue, we can hear all that is not said. XAVIER VIDAL, Nollegiu Bookstore

Praise for The Bitch

A very sensual book that gets under your skin. An overwhelming exploration of maternal desire in the beautiful landscapes of Colombia. LEÏLA SLIMANI, author of The Perfect Nanny

A searing psychological portrait of a troubled woman contending with her instinct to nurture is at the heart of Colombian writer Quintana's slim, potent English-language debut. The brutal scenes unfold quickly, with lean, stinging prose. Quintana's vivid novel about love, betrayal, and abandonment hits hard. Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The magic of this sparse novel is its ability to talk about many things, all of them important, while seemingly talking about something else entirely. What are those things? Violence, loneliness, resilience, cruelty. Quintana works wonders with her disillusioned, no-nonsense, powerful prose. JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ

As Damaris's and Chirli's lives take increasingly tragic turns, their restless natures feel increasingly broadly symbolic of the difficulty of domesticating ourselves and others, even when it serves our best interests. An intense story despite its brevity. A somber and sensitive dog-and-owner tale scrubbed clean of the genre's usual sweetness.Kirkus Reviews

Tough and beautiful. The language Quintana uses is concise, sober, almost laconicit's a ruthless language. HÉCTOR ABAD

This acclaimed novella follows a woman raising a dog in an isolated community on the Pacific coast. Quintana's depiction of the jungle is unforgettable, with its countless storms, insects and garbage washed up on the beach. This is a powerful, jolting tale about class, motherhood and rage. The Guardian

The Bitch distills entire social, ethical, and cultural universes into a potent short novel, thanks to Pilar Quintana's remarkable eye for detail and Lisa Dillman's spare yet stirring translation. Set in a coastal town in Colombia, this novel is populated by complex characters outlined with minimalist strokes of absolute precision, and offers a starling, profound portrait of frustrated desire that will stay with the reader for a long time to come. JURY, National Book Awards

Quintana recreates a wild narrative universe in which the voracity of the jungle, the rain, the sea, and the humidity frame the daily life of the characters of this short novel. The Bitch is one of the most important contemporary novels in Colombia as it broadens the places, voices, and subjectivities from which everyday life, femininity, and motherhood are depicted and narrated. Latin American Literature Today

Simply perfect. MARGARITA GARCÍA ROBAYO, author of Fish Soup

A vivid, powerful book, with a tragic core. Sunday Times

Engrossing. The Bitch is a subtle, moving novel about a struggle to overcome loneliness in an eerie place, among memorable people and animals. Foreword Reviews

Set in Colombia's Pacific coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in the narration until the very…