The Night of Nevermore

It is only 14 July 2021,, about five minutes ago. We are sleeping and suddenly a movement of your body wakes me up. Without opening my eyes, I feel you stand up. This is not unusual, every night you have fallen asleep on my side of the bed, wrapping your arms around me and still dressed, you go at some point to the desk to deal with your insomnia or to finish something unfinished. Now, however, you take a step and there comes a thud. Resounding and unexpected. You have fallen to the floor.

A forty-two-year-old woman, mother of two small children, wakes up in the middle of the night. The deafening sound of her husband falling to the floor fills the room. What seems like an exceptional scene will turn into a film that no one would want to star in. After long hours of waiting under fluorescent tubes and sterile corridors, the medical team confirms the worst: her husband has suffered a stroke and his chances of staying alive are slim.

Heiress to the tradition of making life a literary subject, the narrator finds in literature, film and music a refuge and an honest way of coping with pain and uncertainty, and of revisiting the accident that has put her marriage in jeopardy.

Key points

• Fourth novel by the author, considered among the best of the year 2023 by La Tercera.
• The grief, rage and contradictions of a woman who sees the abyss in front of her eyes.
• An unclassifiable work, delicate and painful, yet far removed from the sentimentality of the commonplace and the cliché.

Lyuba Yez

2018 – Art Critics Circle Award for Best TV Show 2018 with ‘CNN Magazine’