Seven Empty Houses

‘Both noirish and sinister, with violence broiling beneath the calm… Schweblin, at her best, has a knack for eeriness.’

’[Schweblin’s] particular genius lies in the fact that there’s something inherently savage and ungovernable about her work.’

‘A quiet, off-centre gem… Disquieting and dark it may be, but it is lifted with sly humour and sharp observation.’

‘The Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin loves Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Strout. It’s hard to conceive of two more different writers. But imagine a fusion between their styles — dreamlike surrealism and taut domestic drama — and you’ll have some idea of Schweblin’s uniquely weird storyscapes.’

‘Schweblin seems capable above all else of helping us reconsider what stories can be while always making them feel tense, uncomfortable, exhilarating.’

‘Schweblin’s characters lose themselves in webs of greed, loss and violence, and their unsettling tales remind us that we are all shaped by the physical spaces that we inhabit and come from.’

’Seven Empty Houses… takes aim at the place we feel safest: home. Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious.’

‘Samanta Schweblin writes at the very end of the possible. Her stories are mesmerising, exquisitely crafted and deeply unsettling. Each sentence is as precise and invasive as an expertly wielded scalpel.’

‘These seven eerie, uneasy stories seem peculiarly pertinent to the present post-pandemic financial crisis mood of uncertainty… the stories may be spare and pared back, but their cumulative effect is a heightened sense of fear and a disrupted sense of safety.’

‘These curiously addictive, tightly wound stories are as compelling as they are alienating… An original and provoking contribution to the literature of unease.’

‘Seven Empty Houses sneaks dread like a cursed gift through its pages. In Megan McDowell’s translation from the original Spanish, Schweblin’s prose is pared to a fine edge… The collection’s power is in its capacity to speak to the danger that is waiting, if you would only peer in through the keyhole.’

‘Schweblin’s newest collection may be her most unsettling… Spectacular and strange… The most disquieting realization of all is perhaps the fact that any of these scenarios could arrive at any moment.’

‘Uniquely satisfying.’

‘The Argentinian author of Fever Dream deftly manipulates expectations in stories of secrets and buried resentments… Part of the pleasure of Schweblin’s fictions is how she subverts expectations… Her fractured worlds make compelling reading.’

‘Savage and surreal, the inhabitants of these fictions are on a journey deep into the self – but what they discover is not what they, or the reader might expect… Schweblin’s narrators are gloriously unreliable; her stories have the scope of cinema.’

‘The sinuous, sinister tales that make up Seven Empty Houses are set in the intimate sphere, precisely where we might expect to feel most protected. But the houses of the title are not homes, and some of them do not even belong to their occupants… Marvellously apprehensive.’

Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.

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