Tarantula

Translated by Daniel Hahn

Conversation-starting and prize-winning international fiction- an extraordinary meditation on violence, conspiracy and the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust

'We woke up to screaming. In the doorway stood the silhouette of Samuel Blum, our friend and unconditional protector, now uniformed in black and carrying a club. Crawling down his left arm, I slowly noticed, was a huge tarantula.'

In 1984, twelve-year-old Eduardo is sent to the mountains for what his parents describe as Jewish summer camp. What it turns out to be is an immersive re-enactment of a Nazi concentration camp.

Decades later, on the other side of the world, Eduardo sits across a table from a stranger. This is Samuel Blum, the Jewish camp counsellor who transformed into a terrifying Nazi commandant all those years ago. Now he is an old man, and he is ready to talk.

Tarantula is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew living in the long aftermath of the twentieth century, and how the past lives on the present.