A Sunny Place for Shady People

A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times)

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”

Mariana Enriquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires. She has published two story collections in English, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.

Megan McDowell’s translations have won the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the O. Henry Prize (twice), and have been finalists for the Kirkus Prize and the International Booker Prize (four times). In 2020 she won an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. McDowell lives in Santiago, Chile.

• Publisher: Hogarth 
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780593733257
• Item Weight: 0.8 pounds
• Dimensions: 5.7 x 1.0 x 8.6 inches
• BISAC Categories: Literary, Psychological, Hispanic & Latino, Horror, Popular Fiction