Austral

Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica, grew up in Puerto Rico, and studied in the United States.
He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogotá39 group (2017), by Granta magazine as one of
its twenty-five best young Spanish-language writers (2021), and by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as one
of the twenty most promising writers in the world for its "Young Shapers of the Future" (2022). His
previous novels are Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History, both translated by Megan McDowell. His
work has been translated into more than ten languages. He is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the O. Henry Prize, and have been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney's, and Granta, among other publications. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, Kentucky, and lives in Santiago, Chile.

"Austral is a masterly voyage of discovery, both physical and intellectual."
-Anderson Tepper, The New York Times Book Review

"Austral is just a wonderful book. It really spoke to me as someone who has somewhat recently returned to a place and a culture that I left several decades before. Not everyone will have that exact experience, but when you can, obviously that's kind of a magical thing."
-June Thomas, Slate

"An exceptional and intricate novel of depth, insight and understanding, translated with great care by Megan McDowell."
-Declain O'Driscoll, Irish Times

"Expansive and thought-provoking."
-John Self, The Guardian

"Austral reaches across time and space to craft a unique literary environment complete with eccentric characters and grand schemes that gradually reveal the secret of their connections."
-Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts

"The themes of Austral are familiar ones-language, communication, love-but in this novel they find a particular subtlety and poignance."
-Jessica Sequiera, The Rumpus

"An intricate mosaic, a chronicle of human experience."
-Esperanza Hope Snyder, On The Seawall

"The protagonists of this sweeping novel strive to piece together the past in all its cruelty to better understand themselves and whence they came. Austral juxtaposes beautifully the search for truth and the artistic process in a depiction that makes one indistinguishable from the other. With great sensitivity, Carlos Fonseca captures the sense of dislocation that comes to define anyone who has ever been displaced."
-Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon

"In Austral, Fonseca has created a profoundly literary project: to search for the traces of that journey of no return to who we used to be, and to leave a free and joyful record of his unexpected findings discoveries."
-Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder

"Austral is a tender and thoughtful exploration of