Fever Dream

Amanda is dying in a small rural clinic, and a boy named David is sitting at her bedside. She is not his mother and he is not her child. Between them, they piece together a story that leads back to the days before her illness, and the dread that runs through it is tied to poison, damaged lives and how far a family will go to protect its own.

Samanta Schweblin's first novel to reach English readers moves like a nightmare that never lets go. It can be read as a ghost story set in the real world, a cautionary tale and an unsettling kind of love story, all at once. The menace is psychological and the world is just slightly off, so the strangeness seeps in gradually rather than arriving all at once.

She is part of a newer wave of Spanish language writers working in horror. The book is short, tense and absorbing, and it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.