THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE – MARIANA ENRIQUEZ-MEGAN MCDOWELL

The debut collection from the acclaimed author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Our Share of Night. An utterly brilliant measure of deep existential terror… You [will] return home looking pale and haunted Observer Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires – a place where reality and the supernatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These acclaimed gothic tales follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina s dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is contemporary gothic at its darkest and best. The only book that s ever left me afraid to turn out the lights… mercilessly incisive and deeply creepy Irish Times Books of the Year These spookily clear-eyed, elementally intense stories are the business Helen Oyeyemi