Mona

Pola Oloixarac

From Shelf: Best book covers

The brilliant and provocative debut of a Latin American star of world literature.

'Devil-may-care daring and biting humour . . . Think Rachel Cusk's autofiction on skunk and OxyContin and you're in the right ballpark' The Times 'In a literary culture swamped by clenched, worthy fiction and the writer as activist, her satirist's misanthropy and taste for provocation are a tonic' Observer 'Enjoyably mischievous and daring' Financial Times 'Ruthless, very funny' New York Times 'A wicked satire of the literary elite and an exploration of art and violence' New Yorker Mona is a Peruvian writer based on a Californian campus, open-eyed and sardonic, a connoisseur of marijuana and prescription pills. In the humanities she has discovered she is something of an anthropological curiosity - a female writer of colour treasured for the flourish of rarefied diversity that reflects so well upon her department. When she is nominated for 'the most important literary award in Europe', Mona sees a chance to escape her sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, and leaves for a small village in Sweden. Now she is stuck in the company of her competitors, who arrive from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran and Colombia. The writers do what writers do: exchange flattery, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back and go to bed together. But all the while, Mona keeps stumbling across traces of violence on her body, the origins of which she can't - or won't - remember.