Body Where I Was Born, The - Hardcover

Guadalupe Nettel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1609805267 ISBN 13: 9781609805265

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2015

Synopsis

From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood, in which she was born with a birth defect. Her family were intent on fixing it and somehow the narrator has survived the emotional havoc she went through, however she has not emerged completely unscathed. This intimate narrative echoes the voice of the narrator's younger self, a sharp, sensitive girl keen to life's hardships. With bare language and smart humour, both delicate and unafraid, the narrator strings a strand of touching moments together to create a portrait of childhood.

About this title

Review

"One of the fascinating qualities of this book is the unsparing testimony, somewhere between religious confession and secular disclosure, that gives a sharp sense of a woman's harrowing girlhood. Nettel's candid, unaffected prose hews closely to the strictures of the therapy session" --The New York Times

About the Author

The New York Times described GUADALUPE NETTEL's acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories, as "five flawless stories." A Bogotá 39 author and Granta "Best Untranslated Writer," Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and the Anna Seghers Prize. She was short-list for the Neustadt Prize, and most recently, won the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born, a novel of an unconventional childhood in the seventies, is her first novel to appear in English. Nick Flynn called it "utterly compelling .... [Nettel] has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold." She lives and works in Mexico City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1609805267
• ISBN 13: 9781609805265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208