Familiar Setting

I was obsessed for months over the report. I devoured the news on the Internet: more than thirteen hundred children dead in eleven years. One every three days. At that rate, they don’t die; they are killed, someone in a forum wrote. One every three days.
Create a story, a friend told me. I had worked in one of those centers, which we still called Homes of Protection. Like a tasteless joke, I could think now. I told my friend that I only knew how to write reports. But, one night, the ghost of the Wicked Witch—I don’t know if it was to vindicate herself—brought to memory the face of Marilyn, and the two of them dragged me to my notebook.
The story began one Saturday. A house in Vitacura. The man climbed onto the elliptical bike, while his spouse, Maite, dressed in her bathrobe, seated on the bed, thumbed through a magazine. For a week, they had spoken about bringing home a little girl on Christmas. “You are ideal for godparents: a youthful, healthy couple with a sound income,” the woman said to them in the party of the construction company.

In this evocative collection, Suárez weaves together ten tales that delve deep into the complexities of family, exposing the raw, often painful underbelly of relationships. These stories navigate the murky waters of familial dysfunction, drawing readers into a whirlwind of nostalgia, unease, and a spectrum of raw emotions.
From mothers weighed down by recklessness, fathers marked by absence, to young girls turning to the shadows to find a way out, and spinsters retreating from society’s judgment into lonely existences – each tale is a poignant exploration of choices, consequences, and the human yearning for connection.

Key points

• Volume of short stories that have won prizes in different competitions.
• Translated into English and published in the United States by Austin Macauley Publishers.

Maivo Suárez

2022 – Finalist I Latin American Short Story Competition Marta Brunet, University of Chile
2018 – Finalist Children’s Literary Contest Julio C. Cobas, Ecuador
2017 – Juegos Literarios Gabriela Mistral Municipal Award
2013, 2020 – Finalist Santiago en 100 Palabras Contest
2019 – First Place 16th Gonzalo Rojas Short Stories Competition
2016 – Finalist in Teresa Hamel Contest, Chilean Writers Society