A Carnival of Atrocities

The residents of a desolate town nestled in the Ecuadorian Andes are forced to reckon with the legend of Mildred, a girl wronged by the town years ago

Cocuán, a desolate town nestled between the hot jungle and the frigid Andes, is about to slip away from memory. This is where Mildred was born, and where everything she had--her animals, her home, her lands--was taken from her after her mother’s death. Years later, a series of strange events, disappearances, and outbursts of collective delirium will force its residents to reckon with the legend of old Mildred. Once again, they will feel the shadow of death that has hung over the town ever since she was wronged. The voices of nine characters--Mildred, Ezequiel, Agustina, Manzi, Carmen, Víctor, Baltasar, Hermosina, and Filatelio--tell us of the past and present of that doomed place and Mildred’s fate.
Natalia García Freire’s vivid language blurs the lines between dreams and reality and transports the reader to the hypnotic Andean universe of Ecuador.

Natalia García Freire was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1991. She teaches Creative Writing at Escuela de Escritores de Madrid. García Freire’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong to Us, was published in English by World Editions and One World in 2022. This World Does Not Belong to Us won the English PEN Translation Award, was nominated for the Tigre Juan Award and selected by the New York Times as one of the best Spanish-language books of 2019. It has been translated into Italian, French, Turkish, and Danish. A Carnival of Atrocities is Natalia García Freire’s second novel published by World Editions.

Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s master’s programme in literary translation. His published translations include stories by Agustina Bessa-Luís in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books, 2018) and Toño the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize in 2023 and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in the same year. His translation of Natalia García Freire’s This World Does Not Belong to Us was published by World Editions in 2022 and was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.