Austral

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.

Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio’s trip from Aliza’s home in an Argentine artists’ colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

A story of mourning and return--to one’s native country, to one’s darkest memories, to oneself--Carlos Fonseca’s Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica in 1987, brought up in Puerto Rico and studied in the USA. He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogotá 39 group (2016), by Granta magazine as one of its list of the twenty-five best young Spanish-language writers (2021) and by Encyclopaedia Britannica as one of the twenty most promising writers in the world for their ’Young Shapers of the Future’ (2022). His previous novels are Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History, both translated by Megan McDowell. His work has been translated into more than ten languages. He is a lecturer at Cambridge University, where he is a fellow of Trinity College.

Megan McDowell’s translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN Translation award and the Premio Valle Inclán; have been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize; and have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, among other publications. In 2020 she won the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, Kentucky, and lives in Santiago, Chile.