Nancy

“The writing shines with piercing descriptions of pain, drawn up in increasingly fractured minimalist prose.… This visually striking fever dream is one worth braving.” ―Publishers Weekly

“An inventory of abandonment and abuse, inevitable diary of death and of growing up, a diatribe against routine religious fervor, and a bitter collection of involuntary poetry, this extraordinary novel far transcends denunciation and the exercise in style, reaching a new, unexpected, dissident realism.” ―Alejandro Zambra, author of My Documents and Multiple Choice

“An alarming, beautifully compassionate novel. Original and perfect for these strange times we live in.” ―Jazmina Barrera, author of On Lighthouses

“A devastating, psychic exploration of our crumbling world, told in a visceral style that proves Bruno Lloret to be a force among the emerging Chilean writers of today.” ―Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig

“Bruno Lloret’s Nancy is a requiem, a funeral pyre, a poetic novel dedicated to the factory towns and their unremembered inhabitants. Told with breathless economy, an entire world of Romany and gringos, sinners and the devout walk across the serrated desert of this Chilean masterpiece. Part coming-of-age, part meditation on poverty, grief and environmental collapse, I’ve never read anything quite like it.” ―Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt's Garden

“A profound and disturbing meditation on the nature of belief, poverty and the human detritus of global capital.” ―The Saturday Paper

“Nancy is a work of great emotional and intellectual maturity. It is surprising that it is a debut novel. With it, Bruno Lloret announces himself as a writer who is unafraid to explore life at the margins of society, but who is sensitive to the complexity of his subject. The stark, brutal simplicity of the prose, rendered in translation by Ellen Jones, highlights the brutality of the world created on these pages.” ―3:AM Magazine

“An atmospheric, expansive story of melancholy situated somewhere between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert.…Nancy works at the height of fiction’s power to bring us closer to others.” ―ArtsHub (5/5 stars)

“[Nancy] uncovers the painful wounds inflicted by belief and by poverty, when life has become a wilderness, a minefield, an act of survival, in which even love and desire are reduced to nothing, witnesses to a happiness as improbable as it is precarious.” ―Leonardo Sanhueza 

“We have here an extremely sensitive, intelligent, talented writer…A marvel.” ―Rodrigo Hidalgo, El Guillatún

“One of the most original books of the year” ―Natalia Berbelagua, Revista Intemperie

“A novel that flows naturally and can be read quickly, which is not to say that it’s simple – quite the opposite. It toys with existential questions about what it means to be human.” ―Juvenal Romero Pérez, Revista Lecturas

Bruno Lloret (Santiago de Chile, 1990) is a writer and researcher. He has published Nancy (Cuneta, Santiago de Chile, 2015; Two Lines Press, 2020), which received an honorable mention for the Roberto Bolaño Award for novella (2014), and Leña (Overol, Santiago de Chile, 2018). He currently lives in London.

Ellen Jones is a researcher, editor, and Spanish-to-English literary translator based in Mexico City. She has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and is Reviews Editor at Hispanic Research Journal. She writes regularly about multilingualism and contemporary Latin American literature, including for publications like the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her translation from Spanish of Rodrigo Fuentes’s short story collection Trout, Belly Up (Charco Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Translators Association First Translation Prize. You can find her at www.ellencjones.com.