'Powerful and beautifully written, this is a disturbing read, depicting a terrifyingly convincing near-future scenario.'
-- Lisa Tuttle * The Guardian *
'This distressing and emotional science-fiction novel that tells the story of how an inexplicable plague destroys a city ... The collapse of the food supply, bodies, feelings, and the system is narrated with a heartbreaking beauty.'
-- Jordi Carrion *
The New York Times *
'[T]his ominous novel predicts a universe similar to the one that began with the pandemic, one charged with contradictory uncertainties, and it acts like a potential environment where the author can take her obsessions to the extreme and once again consolidate the oppressive and suffocating form that stands out in all of her work.'
-- Leonor Courtoisie * Latin American Literature Today *
'She breaks through parameters, shatters expectations, breaks down internal walls like that invading algae that changes the lives of the residents in the town. Almost like Rulfo in Comala. A poetic and tenacious whirlwind, dreadful and sublime ... An extraordinary work!'
-- Aura Lucia Mera * El Pais *
'A dystopic work worthy of JG Ballard.'
-- Catherine Taylor * The Irish Times *
'Unsettling and unpredictable, Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trias's new novel describes not merely a dystopia but a full-on Technicolor apocalypse.'
-- Stuart Kelly * The Scotsman *
'Pink Slime is a powerful novel - short phrases, unusual poetic twists, the attachment to human ties as a reason to overcome chaos, the insistence of love over heartbreak despite everything. An extraordinary dystopian novel. Highly recommended.'
-- Gioconda Belli, author of
The Country Under My Skin'Halfway between a classic dystopia like 1984 or Farenheit 451 and one of the great catastrophe novels by J.G. Ballard like The Drowned World or The Drought ... Always intense and evocative, and with a subtle construction of layers and mechanisms, this new novel by Fernanda Trias transcends genres and installs itself in a unique territory, at the border of horror without fully sinking into that abyss ... Trias's prose, precise and elegant, is able to bravely look into the abyss with tenderness in the same breath, to return to the central themes of what it means to be human in our culture, and, at the same time, to participate in the contemporary debate about the place that this humanity occupies in a world of crisis. Fernanda Trias has created a mirror where we can see these strange times we are having to live through, and has given her faithful readers the best out of all her novels.'
-- Ramiro Sanchiz, literary critic, translator, and author of
Trashpunk'[A]n extremely powerful metaphor of an emotional world in crisis where everything is about to collapse, held together by the weak threads of memory, tenderness, solidarity, and the effort to make it to a place where life is different. The language is charged with poetic breath but never loses its tie to the concrete, wisely leaning on the details. Reading this novel is both stimulating and disturbing, and after closing it, its images will continue chasing us for a long time, charged with beauty and melancholy. Truly extraordinary.'
-- Piedad Bonnett, poet, dramaturg, novelist, and memoirist
'Trias's gaze ... -her quiet and disquieting writing, poetic and precise - creates cracks and escapes all over the place: in the hearts of her creatures, in their relationships, in the damaged world.'
-- Giuseppe Caputo, author of
An Orphan World'No one writes like Fernanda Trias. Reading her is like watching a revelation or an undressing. That revelation starts gradually and irresistibly, phrase by phrase, until you realise that you are the one being undressed.'
-- Daniel Mella, author of
Older Brother'Time in the haunting, elegiac Pink Slime loops in and around itself. Reading it is like constantly being assailed by a sense of deja vu; passages are repeated, events of the past are re-examined from different angles. The narrator and, by extension, Trias are fixated on ways of measuring time - what marks the beginning, middle and end of the world, of a narrative? ... Pink Slime is a potent allegory of climate change. As the narrator tells us at the end: I cannot stop a future that has already happened.'
-- Sonia Nair * Kill Your Darlings *
Praise for The Rooftop:
'At its core, it's a story about being trapped and the fear, isolation, and anxiety that emerge when one is stuck in a dark, dark place. A tiny, shocking book about despair and its haunting consequences.'
* Kirkus Reviews *
Praise for The Rooftop:
'Trias deftly turns her brief fiction into universal parable.'
* Shelf Awareness *
Praise for The Rooftop:
'A chilling tour-de-force by one of the most exciting and subversive voices writing today in Latin America.'
* Morning Star *
