Nancy

“Extraordinary…reach[es] a new, unexpected, dissident realism.” ―Alejandro Zambra, author of My Documents and Multiple Choice

Alone again in a Chile punctuated by graves, footsteps, x-rays, and crosses, Nancy looks back on her life. Before her cancer, before her husband’s ridiculous death, before she fled home hidden in the back of a truck, she spent her youth at Playa Roja, hearing the rumors of disappeared girls and dead boys while swimming alongside her friends and the creepy old gringos. Her family lost to religion, alcohol, and violence, Nancy has been forced to fend for herself in a world designed to crush her. She keeps going despite it all.

And now, recounting her story from her deathbed, Nancy takes this life in her hands, shapes it anew, and turns it into something else: not a mere calendar of crossed-out days but a wholly original testament to the quiet dignity of a difficult journey.

Bruno Lloret (Santiago de Chile, 1990) is a writer and researcher. He has published Nancy (Cuneta, Santiago de Chile, 2015; Two Lines Press, 2020), which received an honorable mention for the Roberto Bolaño Award for novella (2014), and Leña (Overol, Santiago de Chile, 2018). He currently lives in London.

Ellen Jones is a researcher, editor, and Spanish-to-English literary translator based in Mexico City. She has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and is Reviews Editor at Hispanic Research Journal. She writes regularly about multilingualism and contemporary Latin American literature, including for publications like the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her translation from Spanish of Rodrigo Fuentes’s short story collection Trout, Belly Up (Charco Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Translators Association First Translation Prize. You can find her at www.ellencjones.com.