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Published May 2020
368 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrés Neuman's Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan's 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.
An earthquake unnerves Tokyo on March 11, 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster―and a tectonic stirring of the collective past. Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, an aging executive at an electronics company and a survivor of the atomic bomb, feels as though he is a fugitive of his own memory. As the seams of his country threaten to come undone yet again, he braces himself to make the biggest decision of his life.
Meanwhile, four women narrate their own memories of Watanabe to an enigmatic Argentinian reporter investigating his life. Their stories, told in different languages and describing different loves, map a sociopolitical tour of Tokyo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid, proving that nothing ever happens in one place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth.
"[S]tirring...Neuman slowly builds meaning in the book's recursive structure and language...This weighty meditation on human interconnection is well worth a look." - Publishers Weekly
"[An] emotional journey...The uniformity of the women's cadence and vocabulary tarnishes their individuality a bit, but the story remains a moving meditation on the reverberating waves that shape us and the inescapable impermanence of life. A quiet study of a man struggling to find a serenity to quell his long-entrenched terror." - Kirkus Reviews
"[Neuman is] a wildly talented and curious writer whose books roam energetically around the world and across genres...Fracture is very much about how catastrophe and trauma ripple across the world—the book hopscotches from Tokyo to Madrid, Paris, Buenos Aires, and New York—and, in that sense, offers an eerie reflection of the global reach of our present pandemic." - Vanity Fair
"It is impossible to classify Andrés Neuman: each of his books is a new language adventure, guided by the intelligence and the pleasure of words. He never ceases to surprise us and is, doubtlessly, one of the most daring writers in Latin American literature, willing to change, challenge and explore, always with a unique elegance." - Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire
"Fracture is adventurous, big-hearted and seductive, and it has an appetite for life that is, to me, the trademark of great fiction. Neuman is as generous here as ever." - Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
"One of the things I love about Andrés Neuman's work is how he restores writing as the most powerful source of knowledge. Fracture, this dazzling and devastating novel, is a terrific demonstration of that." - Alejandro Zambra, author of Ways of Going Home
"Traversing languages and cultures, decades and generations, Fracture unites its many fragments to form a powerful and redemptive vision of a single, and unbroken, human life. A searching, humane, and vital novel." - Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries
This information about Fracture 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.
Andrés Neuman was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and grew up in Spain. Neuman was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá-39 list. Traveler of the Century (FSG, 2012) was the winner of the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Spain's two most prestigious literary awards, as well as a special commendation from the jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Neuman has taught Latin American literature at the University of Granada.
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