Pedro the Vast

Translated by Robin Myers

Simon Lopez Trujillo's 'mind-blowing' (Gabriela Cabezon Camara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance.

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of Lopez Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet.

Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves- the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro's condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, Lopez Trujillo is a next-generation Bolano with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.

'A heady and thrilling sci-fi debut ... colourfully satiric ... The plot simmers with violence, including fierce sibling rivalry and political turmoil as Chile is engulfed in protests ... but Trujillo's careful attention to detail and Myers's smooth translation makes it go down easy.' -Publishers Weekly

'An inspired mycelial novel that is as propulsive as it is unsettling. Myers shines in her translation of fever dream while Lopez Trujillo, with the eccentric darkness of much of the best contemporary Latin American literature, hypnotises and haunts.' -Jennifer Croft, translator and author of The Extinction of Irena Rey

'In Pedro the Vast, Simon Trujillo channels the elements of an eco-horror thriller into a spellbinding symphony of otherness. Visionary, disturbing, and at times incredibly sensual, Pedro the Vast confounded my expectations and left me entangled in a feverish world of the mycelial, the alien, and the sublime.' -Ryka Aoki, author of Light From Uncommon Stars