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Pedro the Vast

A Novel

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About this listen

 Simón López Trujillo’s “mind-blowing” (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) novel 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. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction World Literature

Critic Reviews

"Melodious, innovative, and delightfully surreal, the multiple distinct voices of Pedro the Vast weave a story that pushes at our duties to the earth, our families, and communities, that exposes the heartbreaking dystopia of our present. Simón's atmospheric prose fully dunked me into this story of the linked lives of Chileans."—'Pemi Aguda, author of the National Book Award finalist Ghostroots
"We needed this and it's here: Simón is producing a mutant literature, a literature that ensures that human flesh is not made of humanity but of myriad other beings. Mind-blowing."—Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Adventures of China Iron
"Lucid and beautifully written, lyrical yet direct. It gathers unforgettable words and images, transporting us to the open (opening) wound in our vast and devastated land. An exceptional debut.”—Alia Trabucco Zerán, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Clean
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