Published: 07/05/2020
ISBN: 9781783785148
Granta Books
368 pages

Fracture

Andrés Neuman

Translated by Nick Caistor, Lorenza Garcia

In 2011, Mr. Watanabe, a Japanese electronics executive, is in Tokyo when the earthquake that precedes the Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes. In the aftermath, he fins himself on a journey to Fukushima, a tourist of the current day tragedy that mimics his own experiences of World War II.

For Mr Watanabe is one of the few double hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The earthquake shifts his and others memories of those events. Meanwhile, four women based in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid tell their own stories of knowing and loving Mr Watanabe, a victim of one of the largest collective traumas of the last century.

A sweeping novel written with intimacy and compassion, Fracture encompasses some of the most urgent political, social and environmental questions of contemporary life, about collective trauma, memory and love. Already a sensation in Spain, it is major work of imagination from the prize-winning and highly acclaimed Argentinian author.

This book's beautiful, gold-fissured jacket, designed by Jamie Keenan, pays tribute to [kintsugi]... Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia have produced a supremely elegant translation... There are fascinating disquisitions here into cultural difference, language, illness, fear and grief

TLS

Traversing languages and cultures, decades and generations, Fracture unites its many fragments to form a powerful and redemptive vision of a single, and unbroken, human life. A searching, humane, and vital novel

Eleanor Catton

One of the things I love about Andrés Neuman's work is how he restores writing as the most powerful source of knowledge. This dazzling and devastating novel is a terrific demonstration of that

Alejandro Zambra

The Author

ANDRÉS NEUMAN’s Fracture was shortlisted for the Premio Dulce Chacón and the Premio San Clemente Rosalía-Abanca, and is on the longlist for the Premio Gregor von Rizzori. His novel Traveller of the Century (2012) won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Talking to Ourselves (2014) was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Neuman was named one of the original Bogotá39, and one of Granta‘s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now lives in Granada, Spain.

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The Translator

Nick Caistor is a British translator of more than eighty books from Spanish, French and Portuguese. He lived in Argentina for a number of years, where he was the BBC Latin America analyst. He has translated authors such as Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, Mario Benedetti, Julio Cortázar, María Dueñas, Fogwill, Juan Marsé, Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Carlos Onetti and José Saramago. He is a three-time winner of the Premio Valle-Inclán for translation from Spanish.

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The Translator

Lorenza Garcia was born and brought up in England. She spent her early twenties living and working in Iceland and Spain. In 1998 she graduated from Goldsmiths with a first-class honors degree in Spanish and Latin American studies. She moved to France in 2001, where she lived for seven years. Since 2006 she has translated and co-translated more than thirty novels and works of nonfiction from the French, the Spanish, and the Icelandic.

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