Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Layla Martínez is a writer and translator from Madrid. She writes about music for El Salto, and about television for La Última Hora. Since 2014 she has co-directed the independent publisher Antipersona. Woodworm is her first novel. Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. In 2021, she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. Annie McDermott’s translations from Spanish and Portuguese include books by Selva Almada, Mario Levrero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Ariana Harwicz and Lídia Jorge. Her work has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award, and in 2022 she was awarded the Valle-Inclán Translation Prize.<b>An incredible reinvention of the haunted house as a place marked by history’s ghosts.</b>
Financial Times
This supernatural story of an outcast girl and her grandmother<b> lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power.</b>
Stylist
Wonderfully bizarre and <b>ceaselessly creepy</b>... filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of evil. <b>Intergenerational trauma and monsters share the spotlight in this terrific debut.</b>
New York Times
A claustrophobic slice of domestic horror… <b>With impressive economy and hurtling intensity,</b> <i>Woodworm</i> emits a howl of fury against entrenched inequality and enforced servitude, and the constraints they place on working-class women
Times Literary Supplement
<b>A house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge. </b>Layla Martínez’s <b>tense, chilling</b> novel tells a story of specters, class war, violence and loneliness, as naturally as if the witches had dictated this lucid, terrible nightmare to Martínez themselves.
- Mariana Enriquez, author of OUR SHARE OF THE NIGHT,
A modern fairytale.
Harper's Bazaar
If you’re in the mood to read a story about a haunted house that will make your skin crawl, then I cannot recommend <i>Woodworm </i>enough. <b>This book has everything</b>, from witches to saints to angels that look like praying mantises to some of the most unsettling portrayals of ghosts that I’ve come across in a long time.
Polygon
Martinez’s debut novel<b> takes cabin fever to the max </b>in this story of a grandmother, granddaughter, and their haunted house, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. As the story unfolds, so do the house’s secrets, the two women must learn to collaborate with the malevolent spirits living among them.
The Millions
<b>A sophisticated ghost story</b>…breathes new life into the classic haunted house motif through Martinez's vivid exploration of generational trauma, violence, misogyny, and class. Readers won’t soon forget this striking tale.
Publishers Weekly
Martínez’s prose is fairly straightforward with a menacing snarl.…There are interesting dynamics simmering underneath, not least the palpable sense of inherited trauma and the oppressive nature of inequality.…<b>A ghost story buried in a family closet laden with skeletons and sins.</b>
Kirkus Reviews
‘Tense, chilling’ MARIANA ENRIQUEZ
'Lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power' STYLIST
'Incredible' FINANCIAL TIMES
The house breathes.
The house contains bodies and secrets.
The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.
Nobody ever leaves.
The house was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave.
They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy from a local wealthy family draws unwanted press attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.
Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.
Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott
**Readers love Woodworm**
‘It draws you in and slams the door behind you’
‘A monstrous debut’
‘I want to read this book again and again’
‘Biting and inventive’
‘Shirley Jackson by way of Lina Wolff’
‘Deeply, and wonderfully, unsettling’
‘Evokes horrific imagery with a poetic, gnashing tongue’
‘Extraordinary!’