Pedro the Vast

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 Bolano with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that`s always one step ahead of us.