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MacLehose Press signs ‘outstanding’ novels by Latin American authors Vásquez and Fonseca
MacLehose Press has acquired two novels by Latin American authors Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Carlos Fonseca.
Bill Swainson, consultant editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Retrospective by Vásquez from María Lynch at Casanovas & Lynch. He acquired the same rights to Fonseca’s Austral, originally published by Anagrama in 2022, from Sandra Pareja at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.
Retrospective is due for publication on 1st September 2022, in a translation by Anne McLean. It is a novel of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters that tells the story of the real-life Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera. Set during a retrospective of his films in Barcelona in 2016, the story moves from the Spanish Civil War to exile in Latin America, and from the Cultural Revolution in China to the guerrilla movements of late 1960s Latin America.
Swainson says the book is “not only an almost unbelievable series of adventures, but a devastating portrait of the forces that, over a half a century, turned the world upside down and created the one we now inhabit.”
Vásquez, also the author of five earlier novels and two story collections, describes it as “many books at once”: a political novel, an adventure novel, a family saga and a chronicle of the 20th century.
“It was a challenging book, because I‘d never written about a living person without fictionalising them; on the other hand, it follows my old obsession with exploring the impact of history on individual lives,” he said. Vásquez will be in the UK from early October 2022 for six weeks, as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in comparative European literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
Austral by Carlos Fonseca will be published on 1st June 2023, in a translation by Megan McDowell. Costa Rican-born Fonseca’s work has been selected for Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Shapers of the Future. Austral is his first novel to be published in the UK. MacLehose Press is planning a major PR campaign on publication.
“Austral is an investigation of a mystery, an ecological novel and an exploration of the strange relationship between Europe and Latin America,” Swainson said.
Translation rights to the novel have already been snapped up by FSG in New York, Gallimard’s new imprint Scribes (France), Wagenbach (Germany), Metis (Turkey) and Kastaniotis (Greece).
