Paradises - Paperback

by Iosi Havilio (Author), Beth Fowler (Translator), Alex Clark (Introduction by)

Paradises might be a reimagining of Camus' Outsider - but in female form and living in 21st-century Buenos Aires. Our narrator allows the hazards of death and chance encounters to lead her through the city, where she sleepwalks into a job in the zoo's reptile house, and another administering morphine to one of the oddball residents of the squat that she and her young son move into. Is this life in the shadows, an underworld of cut-price Christmases, drugs and dealers, or is this simply life? And why do snakes seem to be invading every aspect of it?

Author Biography

Iosi Havilio (b. 1974 Buenos Aires) Open Door is his first novel. His second novel is Estocolmo (Stockholm, 2010), and he is currently working on a novel - Paradises - that follows on from Open Door. Paradises will be published by And Other Stories later in 2013. He has become a cult author in Argentina after Open Door was highly praised by the outspoken and influential writer Rodolfo Fogwill and by the most influential Argentine critic, Beatriz Sarlo.
Beth Fowler (b. 1980 Inverness) currently lives in Aberdeen. She has spent time in Chile as an English teacher and is now a full-time translator from Spanish and Portuguese into English. In 2010 she won the inaugural Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize and in 2011 translated Havilio's Open Door for And Other Stories, receiving high praise for her translation from the doyenne of Spanish translators Margaret Jull Costa. More recent work includes a translation for Granta magazine's Best of Young Brazilian Novelists issue.