The Twilight Zone

* Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature *

An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author of Space Invaders

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.

How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.

Author: Nona Fernández
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 03/16/2021
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 7.40h x 5.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781644450475


Award: National Book Awards - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2020 pg. 50
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2020
Library Journal 01/01/2021 pg. 68
Publishers Weekly 01/25/2021
Shelf Awareness 03/16/2021
Booklist 10/22/2021

About the Author

Nona Fernández was born in Santiago, Chile. She is an actress and writer, and has published two plays, a collection of short stories, and six novels, including Space Invaders and The Twilight Zone, which was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.

Natasha Wimmer is the translator of Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, as well as nine books by Roberto Bolano, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her most recent translation is The Dinner Guest by Gabriela Ybarra.