Nervous System

'Nervous System is fast, uncompromising and shimmering with intelligence' Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater





'Meruane is one of the one or two greats in the new generation of Chilean writers who promise to have it all' Roberto Bolaño





A young woman struggles to finish her PhD on stars and galaxies. Instead, she obsessively tracks the experience of her own body, listening to its functions and rhythms, finally locating in its patterns the beginning of illness and instability. As she discovers the precarity of her self, she begins to turn her attention to the distant orbits of her family members, each moving away from the familial system and each so different in their experiences, but somehow made similar in their shared history of illness and trauma, both political and personal...



Lina Meruane is one of the most prominent and influential female voices in Chilean contemporary literature. She received her PhD in Latin American Literature from New York University, where she currently serves as professor of World and Latin American Literature and Creative Writing.



Megan McDowell's translations have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review,Harper's, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among others. Her translations have been nominated for the Booker International Prize.



Meruane is a deliberate and immensely gifted writer... Nervous System burns in the mind long after one has read it.



Lina Meruane's language ultimately works best when it surprises... It is one of Nervous System's reminders of life's staggering happenstance.



Nervous System is fast, uncompromising and shimmering with intelligence



Nervous System's dreamy lull belies the slow-motion horror of its plot... I still feel blurrily half-drowned in Meruane's eerie, swirling poetics.



This is an absolutely fantastic novel. From black holes to mass graves, undiagnosable diseases and (perhaps most terrifying of all) a PhD that hasn't been written, Nervous System is frank, brave, and unsparing. The precision of Meruane's sentences will cut through you like a scalpel.