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Award-winning Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener delivers her stunning English breakthrough in this "appealingly raw" (NPR) and "incisive" (Publishers Weekly) work of autofiction that explores colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer.
Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them—but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.
In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela returns to Peru. In alternating strands, she begins to probe her father's infidelity, her own polyamorous relationship, and the history of her colonial ancestor, unpacking the legacy that is her birthright. From the eye-patched persona her father adopted to carry out his double life to the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles's book, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy, and fraud, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race.
"[An] incisive work of autofiction ... shift[ing] seamlessly from the historical to the intimate, often with humor... . Wiener's slim and affecting novel will whet readers' appetites for more." —Publishers Weekly
"Even as it probes the author's own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call 'history.'" —BookPage
"Undiscovered has an appealingly raw, confessional tone, but its prose is highly polished. Sanches' translation does not have an extraneous word. It is also—fittingly, for a book about post-colonial history—committed to retaining the original text's Peruvian-ness... . Gabriela, who calls herself 'the most Indian of the Wieners,' cannot forget that: In Sanches' exceptional translation, neither can anyone else." —NPR
"A rollicking decolonial fact-fiction remix of ... [Wiener's family] histories, the life of her great-great-great grandfather, the explorer Charles Wiener, and how all this time plays out in her own body, and her current life, and polyamorous household in Madrid." —Electric Literature
"Gabriela Wiener is a completely unique talent: a graceful storyteller, an acute observer of human vanity, a writer of bold, often delightful insights. Every book she writes is an event not to be missed." —Daniel Alarcón, PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and Author of At Night We Walk in Circles
"Gabriela Wiener's ease and grace allow her in Undiscovered to explore family, desire, racism, colonialism and being a migrant both tenderly and crudely, vulnerable yet resolute like her beautiful prose." —Mariana Enríquez, Author of Our Share of Night
"Reading Undiscovered, I wondered what so captivated me about this novel. Was it Gabriela's innate ability to plunder all sorts of convention? Her persistent exploration of our deepest despairs–the weight and falsehoods of the stories and imperatives we inherit? All this, but Undiscovered is also spurred on by a yet more profound and radical strength: the spirit of fury. Powerful and searing, this novel snaps, bucks, heals, and snaps again..." —Samanta Schweblin, Author of the National Book Award winning Seven Empty Houses
This information about Undiscovered 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.
Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist. Her books include Sexographies, a collection of gonzo journalism about contemporary sex culture. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and translated into six languages. In 2018, she was awarded Peru's National Journalism Award for her part in an investigative report on gender violence. She currently resides in Madrid.
Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, and Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, for which she won the 2022 PEN translation prize. Born in Brazil, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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