“How different are you now from the David of six years ago?” Amanda asks. The tale that follows is a swift descent into phantasmagoria, as the dialogue between Amanda and David - translated into lucid English by McDowell - turns into a cleareyed reminiscence of horror and a struggle for narrative control. ‘What I wouldn’t give now for David to simply be missing a finger.’ I was convinced he was missing a finger,’ she says, remembering when she had a new mother’s ordinary fears. ‘The first time they put him in my arms, I was so anxious. “She describes traveling with her young daughter to a vacation rental outside the capital and meeting David’s mother, who immediately insinuates that something so monstrous has happened to David that she no longer considers him her son.

A woman named Amanda lies on a hospital gurney, recounting her story to David, a boy who pushes her to relive the events that have brought her there, wrapped in the rough sheets of her deathbed, able to talk but unable to move.” “To call Schweblin’s novella eerie and hallucinatory is only to gesture at its compact power the fantastical here simply dilates a reality we begin to accept as terrifying and true. 'Samanta Schweblin is one of the most promising voices in modern literature.Samanta Schweblin’s (CRF 2011) Fever Dream received a glowing review in The New York Times. '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 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 ' Fever Dream is a small masterpiece, a beautiful and chillingly contemporary book. Prepare to be mesmerized, riveted, terrified, and changed.' - Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat This mind-bending book sheds new light - or, rather, new darkness - on the intense power of love in a poisoned world. 'Samanta Schweblin is a magician, and reading her work is an intense, almost physical experience. Fever Dream is a triumph of Schweblin's outlandish imagination.' Juan Gábriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations

'A wonderful nightmare of a book: tender and frightening, disturbing but compassionate. 'A thought-provoking story that provides ample opportunity for readers to grapple with its unanswered questions.' - Booklist '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 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

Fever dream by samanta schweblin