INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST • The hallucinatory, terrifying first novel of an international literary star and "genius" (The New Yorker)
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. Part of a new wave of Spanish language horror writers, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel. "To call Schweblin's novella eerie and hallucinatory is only to gesture at its compact power; the fantastical here simply dilates a reality we begin to accept as terrifying and true. . . . Schweblin's book is suffused with haunting images and big questions." -New York Times Book Review
"Samanta Schweblin's electric story reads like a Fever Dream." -Vanity Fair
"I picked up Fever Dream in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn't bring myself to look out the windows. . . . The genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether." -Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
"A nauseous, eerie read, sickeningly good." -Emma Cline, author of Girls
"Subtle, dreamy and indelibly creepy." -The Economist (Best Books of 2017)
"Never have I ever been so afraid to read a book right before bed." -Marie Claire
"A spare, hypnotic literary page-turner." -O, the Oprah Magazine
"Mesmerizing . . . Schweblin, though, is an artist of remarkable restraint. . . . She renders psychological trauma with such alacrity that the conceit of a poisoned environment feels almost beside the point." -Washington Post
"This small debut novel packs a mighty, and lingering, punch. . . . [A] compact, but explosive, package. Schweblin delivers a skin-prickling masterclass in dread and suspense. . . . With virtuoso skill, well served in Megan McDowell's finely textured translation, Schweblin fuses a study in maternal anxiety with an ecological horror story. She refracts both strands through the eerie prism of her narrative, almost as if Henry James had scripted a disaster movie about toxic agribusiness." -The Economist
"Elusiveness takes a terrifyingly creepy form in this dazzling short novel." -NPR
"Unsettling... [T]he novel represents a perfect marriage of form and subject, in which its narrative instability - which is so of the literary moment - viscerally recreates the insecurities of life in the Argentine countryside today.... [Schweblin] has found ways to electrify and destabilize the physical world... [Fever Dream is] the scariest of all things: a ghost story that is, in essence, true." -Los Angeles Times
"It's rare for a book to do exactly what its title says it will do without any caveats or reservations. It's even more rare for a book to achieve the kind of woozy, elliptical, intimate horror implied by a title like Fever Dream. But this debut novel by Argentinian short story writer Samanta Schweblin - translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell - does exactly that.... Fever Dream is a novel stripped down to its barest elements, all dialogue and atmosphere, and working with only those elements, it manages to create an authentic nightmare… If you're after creeping, insidious, psychologically compelling horror, then you won't do better." -Vox
"An absorbing and inventive tale... Schweblin is a fine mythmaker, singular in her own fantastical artistry." -Houston Chronicle
"Mesmerizing, frightening... Schweb
