Seven Empty Houses
* An Oprah Daily Book of 2022 *
A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three-time International Booker Prize finalist, 'lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.' -O, the Oprah magazine
The world of Samanta Schweblin's short stories is dark and destabilising. Here, home is not a place of safety but the site of hidden danger, silent menace, unspoken resentment. Picture-perfect doors and spotless windows conceal lives in disarray, slowly unraveling in the face of obsession and fear, jealousy and desire.
Unsettling, exhilarating and fiercely original, these prizewinning stories expose raw and uncomfortable truths about the people and places we think will keep us safe, and ask what happens when that promise proves empty.
'Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious.' New York Times Book Review
Samanta Schweblin won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her story collection, Seven Empty Houses. Her debut novel, Fever Dream, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and her novel Little Eyes and story collection Mouthful of Birds have been longlisted for the same prize. Her books have been translated into over forty languages, and her work has appeared in English in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and elsewhere. Originally from Buenos Aires, Schweblin lives in Berlin.