Pedro the Vast

Simón López Trujillo's 'mind-blowing' (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) 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 López 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, López Trujillo is a next-generation Bolaño with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.