The Accidentals

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an 'accidental', an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man's desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences. Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical, The Accidentals is the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.

About the Author :
Guadalupe Nettel was born in Mexico and grew up between Mexico and France. She is the author of the international award winning novels El huésped [The Guest] (2006), The Body Where I Was Born (2011), After the Winter (2014, Herralde Novel Prize) and Still Born (2020) and four collections of short stories, all published by Anagrama, the most prestigious of all Spanish-language publishing houses. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has appeared in publications such as Granta, The White Review, El País, the New York Times, La Repubblica and La Stampa. She currently lives in Mexico City where she's the director of the magazine Revista de la Universidad de México. Rosalind Harvey is a literary translator and educator from Bristol and now based in Coventry in the West Midlands. She has translated writers such as Juan Pablo Villalobos, Elvira Navarro, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and her work has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, amongst others. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Arts Foundation Fellow, a committee member of the Translators Association, and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network.

Review :
‘Oscillating between realism and dark fantasy, and impeccably translated by Rosalind Harvey, the stories in The Accidentals are delightful and disturbing, and confirm Nettel as one of the finest Mexican writers of her generation.’ — Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times ‘Guadalupe Nettel is widely regarded as a leading writer of her generation, and in various ways her four novels and three short story collections continue to seek out the fantastic that lurks in the interstices of everyday life…. Nettel’s prose, brought to us in Rosalind Harvey’s punctilious translation, is precise and formalized, with a wildness held back – like a neat picket fence confining a dangerous place. The title story is a heartbreaker without a superfluous line. An albatross, we’re told, that strays too far from home and loses its bearings, becomes an “accidental”, an unmoored wanderer. These stories illustrate different ways a person can become an accidental in their own world.’ — Lee Langley, The Spectator ‘Guadalupe Nettel yet again walks into uncertain terrain with these mysterious stories. There are secrets everywhere, she says, especially in life’s most intimate and familiar aspects. The Accidentals never loses its sense of things being out of joint, and Nettel explores these fears with calm and with beauty.’  — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night ‘I adored this collection, it spread its roots out within me. Nettel is an extraordinary writer.’ — Daisy Johnson, author of The Hotel ‘The Accidentals is a striking and compelling collection that searches for the extraordinary within the ordinary. Each narrative veers seamlessly from the mundane to the existential; the writing is deft, and unsettling prose imbues the work with a profound resonance. I loved these stories, mad and controlled, and brilliant.’ — Elaine Feeney, author of All the Good Things You Deserve ‘Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature.... I envy how naturally she makes use of language; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profound and penetrating knowledge of human nature.’ — Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive ‘I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science.’ — Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast ‘Nettel is free. She has succeeded in creating an audacious narrative style all her own, a singular and fearless way of being in the world. An essential voice of the new Latin American literature.’ — Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac’s Problem ‘Slyly inventive and delightfully disquieting, The Accidentals is an incredible story collection filled with worlds both deceptively familiar and wondrously strange. A master of the form, Nettel draws each of her universes with great precision. Each story delivers a deliciously effective and haunting sting you’ll remember long afterwards.’ — Gina Chung, author of Green Frog ‘The stories in The Accidentals move through a landscape that is both foreign and familiar, mysterious and menacing, dreamy and distraught, and I had the palpable sense that anything might happen next. It is the kind of book you read in a single afternoon, gladly relinquishing the cares of day-to-day life to sink into its otherworldly submersions.’ — Jessie Ren Marshall, author of Women! In! Peril! ‘In this electrifying collection, Mexican writer Nettel stages sliding door moments for her characters and explores their life-altering consequences. With laser-like precision, the eight stories probe such universal aspects of the human condition as desire, loneliness, and memory…. In crisp and striking prose, Nettel mines the complexities of relationships, in which secrets and betrayals have the power to change everything. Readers will be wowed.’ — Publishers Weekly ‘Excelling at pinpointing the uneasy in the everyday, these stories delve into characters who find themselves adrift in an unstable world. Here, families don’t provide comfort, but instead provoke existential crisis and the dawning realization that close relationships can be emotionally suffocating rather than sustaining.’ — Eithne Farry, Daily Mail ‘The Accidentals, beautifully translated by Rosalind Harvey, begins with an epigraph from Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”. This entry point serves as a subtle warning. The eight stories that follow [take] us inside the apartments of Barcelona and the bayous of Louisiana, into the depths of the Bois de Vincennes and the parks of Mexico City. The subject matter varies too. There is a touch of the supernatural, of things being normal and yet somehow off…. The Accidentals is very good on desire. Nettel opens up eight little worlds in which she articulates the pain of badly wanting something and the feeling of emptiness when it is finally attained.’ — Oonagh Devitt-Tremblay, Times Literary Supplement