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By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner.
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.
An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Claudia, the 8-year-old narrator of Pilar Quintana's Abyss, lives in an apartment so overgrown with plants she calls it "the jungle." Outside, the city of Cali, Colombia, is "gloomy and desolate, like the inside of a very old house." She's frequently left to her own devices, her mother too engrossed in celebrity tabloids like Hola! and Vanidades, her father working late at the family supermarket. Quintana's spare, atmospheric novel, succinctly translated by Lisa Dillman, explores Claudia's high anxiety and the terrors of the adult world." —The New York Times
"A terrifying vision of what it means to inherit our parents' fears and disillusionments. Perhaps Pilar Quintana's greatest achievement is to immerse us in Claudia's phantasmagorical jungle without us really noticing, before swiftly unveiling a daughter's fantasy to a be a mother's painful reality; to remind us that phantoms are all the more frightening when they are real." —Times Literary Supplement
"A vivid and compelling exploration of family dynamics and the damage they can do, Abyss is a tale to fall into and learn from." —New Internationalist
"In Abyss, published in Spain in 2021, Quintana goes further into the persistence of disenchantment among women. This time the narrative's voice is Claudia, a woman in her mid-40s who recalls moments growing up in the Colombian city of Cali with her mother and father. She was seven or eight years old then, the time of her first Communion. (…) Quintana is a master of restraint and the paced accumulation of significance. (…) Claudia speaks as one who has peered at the world and its humans. Quintana gives her room to observe the ordinary and the landscapes of Colombia – as well as the secretive maneuvers of adults." —Ron Slate, On the Seawall
"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." —Hector 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
This information about Abyss was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Pilar Quintana is a widely respected Colombian author. In 2007, Hay Festival selected her as one of the most promising young authors of Latin America. Her previous novel, The Bitch, won a PEN Translates award in the UK and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the US. It also won the prestigious Colombian Biblioteca de Narrativa Prize, was selected for several Best Books of 2017 lists, and was chosen as one of the most valuable objects to preserve for future generations in a marble time capsule in Bogotá. Abyss, her latest novel, was awarded the Alfaguara de Novela Prize, which is among the most prestigious awards in the Spanish language.
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