Synopses & Reviews
We begin where we end: what happened in this rundown apartment, closed off from the world?
In a rundown apartment building, in an unnamed city in Uruguay, a father and daughter close themselves off from the world. ‘The world is this house’, says Clara, and the rooftop becomes their last recess of freedom. A pet canary is their only witness.
As Clara’s connection to the outside is stripped away — the neighbor who stops coming by, the lover whose existence is only known by a pregnancy — desperation and paranoia take hold. It's a stifling embrace, and we are there with her, our narrator, dreading what we know the future holds.
Review
"Trías deftly turns her brief fiction into universal parable." Shelf Awareness
Review
"A chilling tour-de-force by one of the most exciting and subversive voices writing today in Latin America." Morning Star
Review
"Many read Rooftop like a disturbing love story between a father and his daughter, but this novel is much more than that. It is the genesis of the themes that will be at the centre of everything that Trías would move on to write: fear, violence, loss and freedom." WMagazín
Review
"Masterfully written, with a simplicity and honesty that reminds us of the prose of Flannery O’Connor." Revista de Letras
Review
"Fernanda Trías appears from the antipodes of the sterile literature currently in vogue, to show us she is one of the most interesting authors writing in Spanish today." Mario Levrero, author of Empty Words
About the Author
Considered to be one of the authors forming part of the 'new Latin American Boom' of women writers, Fernanda Trías (Uruguay, 1976) is without doubt one of the most prominent literary voices in today's River Plate region and in all of Latin America. Her books have been published in Spain as well as in Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, and also in France. However, none of her books have have appeared in English until now.
Annie McDermott's published and forthcoming translations include Mario Levrero's Empty Words and The Luminous Novel (And Other Stories and Coffee House Press), Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (co-translation with Carolina Orloff, Charco Press) and City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translation with Jethro Soutar, Dalkey Archive Press). Her translations, reviews and essays have appeared in Granta, The White Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement and LitHub, among others. Annie also edits books for Charco Press, including Julián Fuks' Resistance and Giuseppe Caputo's An Orphan World. Her translation of Almada's third novel, Brickmakers, will come out with Charco Press and Graywolf in 2021.