Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2017
192 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, and a love story.
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.
"Starred Review. In a literary thriller of the highest order, Schweblin teases out the underlying anxieties of being vulnerable and loving vulnerable creatures and of being an inhabitant of a planet with an increasingly uncertain future." - Kirkus
"Powered by an unreliable narrator - is Amanda imagining David by her side? - Schweblin guides her reader through a nightmare scenario with amazing skill." - Publishers Weekly
"A thought-provoking story that provides ample opportunity for readers to grapple with its unanswered questions." - Booklist
"A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin's outlandish imagination." – Juan Gábriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations
"Samanta Schweblin is a magician, and reading her work is an intense, almost physical experience. This mind-bending book sheds new light - or, rather, new darkness - on the intense power of love in a poisoned world. You must read it. Prepare to be mesmerized, riveted, terrified, and changed." - Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat
"Fever Dream is a small masterpiece, a beautiful and chillingly contemporary book. Every word throbs a kind of wisdom that can only come from a meticulous and fully engaged observation of reality." - Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice and My Documents
"Samanta Schweblin will injure you, however safe you may feel." - Jesse Ball, author of A Cure for Suicide and How to Set a Fire and Why
"Samanta Schweblin is one of the most promising voices in modern literature." - Mario Vargas Llosa
This information about Fever Dream was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Samanta Schweblin was chosen as one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35 by Granta. She is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into 20 languages. Fever Dream is her first novel. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
Megan McDowell has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors, and her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among other publications. She lives in Chile.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
Daughters of Shandong
by Eve J. Chung
Eve J. Chung's debut novel recounts a family's flight to Taiwan during China's Communist revolution.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
