- Published: 06/08/2020
- ISBN: 9781846276934
- Granta Books
- 208 pages
A Luminous Republic
Andrés Barba
Translated by Lisa Dillman
One day, the children begin to show up in the subtropical town of San Cristóbal. Aged between nine and thirteen, the children are covered in dirt and hungry. They beg food, commit small acts of vandalism, play games that don’t seem to have any rules, and communicate with each other in a strange language. No one knows where they come from or where they disappear to each night. And then, they rob a supermarket and stab two adults, bringing fear to the town. Thus begins a fearsome and thrilling modern morality tale that retraces the lines between good and evil, the civilised and the wild, and drags our assumptions about childhood and innocence out into the light.
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A Luminous Republic has all the stark power of a folk-tale or a fable. It also raises concerns that are pressing and contemporary-about the function and source of language, about public paranoia and hysteria, about the idea of community and how information spreads. At the book's center is a moving personal story about memory and loss. The narrative is engaging, at times playful, wholly compelling
Colm Tóibín
At first you will feel fear, but what you feel next is something much deeper, disturbing and luminous
Samanta Schweblin
Disquieting without tricks and beautiful without artifice, A Luminous Republic is an engrossing tale of unusual moral precision... A triumph
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
From the Same Author
Such Small Hands
Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman
Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital.
She has learned to say this flatly and without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll’s name (also Marina) and her age (seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash and now she lives in the orphanage with the other little girls. But Marina is not like the other little girls.
In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina and the girls play games of desire and warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime and bedtime are charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the Doll, she sets in motion a chain of events from which there can be no release.
With shades of Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro and Mariana Enríquez, Such Small Hands is a beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a bedtime story to keep readers awake.
Andrés Barba on Granta.com
In Conversation | The Online Edition
Andrés Barba on Such Small Hands
Andrés Barba & Josie Mitchell
Granta’s Josie Mitchell talked to Andrés Barba about his new book, Such Small Hands, Gothic and Greek Literature, and how he approaches writing from a child's perspective.
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Introducing Javier Arancibia Contreras
Andrés Barba
‘In this story, the troubled translator’s only interlocutor is, of course, a rat with human vices and traits.’
Fiction | Granta 113
The Coming Flood
Andrés Barba
‘When it happens, she gets the feeling that the men, for her, are a way to cling to life.’
