Seeing Red

Winner of the Premio Valle Inclán (Spanish Translation) 2019 - Awarded by The Society of Authors

Winner of the prestigious Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2018



'A scorching examination of how being utterly dependent on someone - even someone you love - can make you a monster' -- Literary Hub, Translated Books by Women You Need to Read





Lucina, a young Chilean writer, has moved to New York to pursue an academic career. While at a party one night, something that her doctors had long warned might happen finally occurs: her eyes haemorrhage. Within minutes, blood floods her vision, reducing her sight to sketched outlines and tones of grey, rendering her all but blind. As she begins to adjust to a very different life, those who love her begin to adjust to a very different woman - one who is angry, raw, funny, sinister, sexual and dizzyingly alive.



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.



Seeing Red is outstanding; complex yet graceful, gnarly yet beautiful. The best book I've read this year.



Astonishing... Burns with vigour and urgency



Viscous, repulsive, and beautiful



Stunning... Black and bitter and bloody and beautiful



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



A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence



What I really admired in Seeing Red is Meruane's equal commitment to strong, spare prose and the moral messiness of suffering and loss in a place of safety. She refuses to make a neat or easy story, stays true to the uncomfortably arbitrary nature of sickness and sorrow, denies her narrator and therefore her reader the comforts of heroism while insisting on the redemptive possibilities of literary form.