Author(s): Samanta Schweblin

Short Stories | Argentina | Translated fiction

From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Fever Dream comes a hotly anticipated new collection of eerie short stories. Playful and unsettling, teeming with the energy of barely contained violence, Seven Empty Houses dismantles the neat appearance of domesticity to expose the darkness and discomfort that lies beneath.

A neighbour looks on as a couple grieve the loss of their son. A young girl makes an unwelcome acquaintance in a hospital waiting room. A woman prepares for death with ruthless precision. Ominous and exhilarating, reminiscent of the best of Shirley Jackson, these chilling tales cement Samanta Schweblin's place among the finest short-story writers at work today.

'Both noirish and sinister, with violence broiling beneath the calm... Schweblin, at her best, has a knack for eeriness.'

-- Sunday Telegraph

'[Schweblin's] particular genius lies in the fact that there's something inherently savage and ungovernable about her work.'

-- Financial Times

'The Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin loves Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Strout. It's hard to conceive of two more different writers. But imagine a fusion between their styles - dreamlike surrealism and taut domestic drama - and you'll have some idea of Schweblin's uniquely weird storyscapes... What does it mean to inhabit a house, or a body, and what do those spaces become when we're no longer fully there? Haunting, elemental questions that run right through this bold writer's eerie, mysterious oeuvre.'

-- The Sunday Times

'Rejoice! Just when we're settling into fall, all cozy on the couch with a Netflix show queued up, a new short story collection from Samanta Schweblin is here to spit in your pumpkin spiced latte and drag its nails down the wall. Seven Empty Houses... takes aim at the place we feel safest: home. 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 writes at the very end of the possible. Her stories are mesmerising, exquisitely crafted and deeply unsettling. Each sentence is as precise and invasive as an expertly wielded scalpel.'

-- Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

'The proximity to Halloween is appropriate, given Schweblin's idiosyncratic mode of tense and unsettling literary horror. As in Fever Dream and Little Eyes...something is always creeping around these empty houses.'

-- The Millions

'Starting a story by the Argentinian Samanta Schweblin is like tumbling into a dark hole with no idea where you'll end up.'

-- Chris Power, The Sunday Times

'Schweblin's newest collection may be her most unsettling... Spectacular and strange... The most disquieting realization of all is perhaps the fact that any of these scenarios could arrive at any moment.'

-- Washington Post

'I find Samanta's writing to be simply superb. She keeps you gripped to her writing and turning the pages long after you should have returned to other tasks... This is an excellent collection of short stories looking at our ordinary domestic lives, and I will certainly be recommending this book to all who will listen.'

* Independent Book Reviews *

'Ethereal... Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.'

-- Kirkus

'Evocative.'

-- Publishers Weekly

'Excellent.'

-- Bookriot

'Uniquely satisfying.'

-- LitHub

'Perfect reading for the month of the dead.'

-- The Gloss

'While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin's previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists.'

-- The Spectator

'The Argentinian author of Fever Dream deftly manipulates expectations in stories of secrets and buried resentments... Part of the pleasure of Schweblin's fictions is how she subverts expectations... Her fractured worlds make compelling reading.'

-- Observer

Author Biography: Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.