Piñen

Translated by Jacob Edelstein

A fierce, tender collection of stories about the lives, traumas, and dreams of Mapuche youth in modern-day Chile.

Jesús, Valeska, Yajaira, and Ale are some of the vivid characters that inhabit the stories told in Piñen , a book that casts an unflinching gaze on the stark margins of urban life. Within its pages unfold the bullet-ridden death of a big shot from the blocks; the fraught, often violated sexuality of women in a displaced community; the unwavering bond between two friends navigating the waria ; the toxicity that seeps through youth and the distances that inevitably come with growing up; and, finally, a fierce declaration of love to the clandestine spirit of a brother. These are young lives that drift through the many peripheries of the city carrying a hope as immense as the injustice that defines their days.

The stories that make up Piñen invite the reader into an intimate, often overlooked space – those small, enclosed rooms where the everyday tragedies of the many silently unfold. With brutal realism and lyrical restraint, Daniela Catrileo renders these acts of courage and violence with masterful precision, granting voice and presence to those rarely seen in literature.

'Catrileo sketches out a poetic and political map...of Andean territory.' – La Nación

'A beautiful, merciless book that offers a glimpse into the old wound of belonging and exclusion, approached with a rarely explored rawness.' – Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder

'Piñen is a profound and harsh book, a narrative that at times strikes like a whip, yet threaded with moments of strange and haunting beauty.' – Selva Almada, author of Not a River