Pedro the Vast

Simon Lopez Trujillo’s ‘mind-blowing’ (Gabriela Cabezon Camara) 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 Lopez 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, Lopez Trujillo is a next-generation Bolano with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that’s always one step ahead of us.

‘An inspired mycelial novel that is as propulsive as it is unsettling. Myers shines in her translation of fever dream while L pez Trujillo, with the excentric darkness of much of the best contemporary Latin American literature, hypnotises and haunts.’
-Jennifer Croft, translator and author of The Extinction of Irena Rey

‘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. Simon’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- Simon 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 Cabez n Camara, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Adventures of China Iron