Guadalupe Nettel for The Accidentals

Guadalupe Nettel is the author of the international award winning novels El huesped [The Guest], The Body Where I Was Born, After the Winter (Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker prize.

Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, El Pais, the New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City where she's the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de Mexico.

We are delighted to welcome Guadalupe for her new short story collection The Accidentals, a series of deft and disquieting tales that oscillate between the real and the fantastical.

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer.

The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man's desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences.

'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