Description
Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel’s fourth novel, explores one of life’s most consequential decisions – whether or not to have children – with her signature charm and intelligence. Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura has taken the drastic decision to be sterilised, but as time goes by Alina becomes drawn to the idea of becoming a mother. When complications arise in Alina’s pregnancy and Laura becomes attached to her neighbour’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions. In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Still Born explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.
‘In Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood, which this novel explores and deepens’ Annie Ernaux, author of The Years
‘Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature…. I envy how naturally she makes use of language; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profound and penetrating knowledge of human nature’ Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
‘This highly original novel, in an excellent translation by Rosalind Harvey, pursues a range of ideas connected to children, who should have them and who should take care of them…There’s a dark undertow to Still Born that reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s novels’ Miranda France, TLS
About the Author
Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico in 1973 and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international-award winning novels The Body Where I was Born (2011), After the Winter(2014, Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born (2020) and three collections of short stories, all published by Anagrama, the most prestigious of all Spanish-language publishing houses. Her work has been translated into more than ten languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, El País, the New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City and was until recently the editor of the prestigious magazine, Revista de la Universidad de México.
About the Translator
Rosalind Harvey has translated many writers including Juan Pablo Villalobos, Elvira Navarro, Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Enrique Vila-Matas. Their work has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Harvey is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network.
