Author: Simn Lopez Trujillo

Simn Lpez Trujillo's "mind-blowing" (Gabriela Cabezn Cmara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance . . .

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of Lpez Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro's condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, Lpez Trujillo is a next-generation Bolao with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.

Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 01/13/2026
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Paperback
Size: 9.50h x 6.25w x 0.61d
ISBN: 9781643757100

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/06/2025

About the Author
Simn Lpez Trujillo is a Chilean writer and translator, and author of the novel El vasto territorio (2021), the poetry chapbook Maestranza (2018), and the poem-object Intemperie (2017). He has been awarded the Roberto Bolao Award and has received grants and fellowships from the Chilean Ministry of Arts & Culture, the Pablo Neruda Foundation, and MacDowell.

Robin Myer is a Mexico City-based Spanish-to-English translator and poet. Her recent translations include works by authors such as Javier Pealosa M. and Isabel Zapata. A winner of the 2019 Poems in Translation contest and longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry, she has been published in several acclaimed poetry journals across the country.