Fever Dream

Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this taut, unsettling ghost story for the real world. Translated by Megan McDowell.

A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. The two seem anxious as, at David’s ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past. As David pushes her to recall whatever trauma has landed her in her terminal state, he unwittingly opens a chest of horrors - and the terrifying nature of their reality is brought into shocking focus.

"...the genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether."  -  Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

"Schweblin writes with such restraint that I never questioned a sentence or a statement. This is the power of the short novel: Stripped down to its essentials, her story all but glows. Which makes sense, after all. It's toxic."  -  Lily Meyer, NPR

Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize. In 2019 she was longlisted for the Booker International Prize for Mouthful of Birds. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.