A novel by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey

September 4, 2018 • 5.5 x 8.25 • 264 pages • 978-1-56689-525-5

In Havana, Paris, and New York City, Claudio and Cecilia succumb to our implacable movement toward love.

Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss.

About the Author

Guadalupe Nettel was voted one of the thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine at the Bogotá Hay Festival in 2006. She has lived in Montreal and Paris and is now based in Mexico City. Her previous books include Natural Histories and The Body Where I Was Born.

Rosalind Harvey is an award-winning literary translator and a teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. She has worked on books by Guadalupe Nettel, Elvira Navarro, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Héctor Abad Faciolince, among others.

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Reviews

Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award

“Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A compassionately written portrait of urban loneliness and the human impulse to belong.” —Kirkus

“In After the Winter, Nettel has fashioned a powerful and luminous novel, one that portrays absence, presence and human imperfection with a unique and penetrating voice.” —Ploughshares

“Previous relationships haunt the characters’ interior monologues, and woven into Nettel’s confident, empathic lines is the sad certainty that the author has explored in her other works: that life, let alone love, is fleeting.” —The Atlantic

“Nettel’s mission is deeply personal and recognizably urgent.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Nettel brilliantly conveys the way things can go wrong at the beginning of a relationship and how those disasters can push us in unexpected directions.” —Words Without Borders

“Brilliantly written.” —Guernica

“In capturing the voices, travails, and eventual connection of two lonelyhearts, Guadalupe Nettel’s After the Winter captures the spirit of urban loneliness so vividly that it’s often painful to read.” —The Quarterly Conversation

“Nothing short of transcendent.” —Three Percent

“Powerful and fun and, at times, devastating in the most meaningful ways.” —Angel City Review

“Utterly brilliant.” —Bookriot

“After the Winter asks big questions about intimacy and desire, happiness and depression, passion and numbness, and, of course, love and loss.” —Southwest Review

“In a tale of intertwining fates and the threads of interiority that connect the most disparate souls, Mexico City–based Guadalupe Nettel perfectly explicates the loneliness of expatriation as well as the gravity of a momentary meeting when one longs for love.” —World Literature Today

“Guadalupe Nettel is a writer to trust: she will take you into the mind’s dark places, illuminate them brilliantly, and bring you out again feeling like you have been somewhere important.” —Three Percent

“[W]hat most connects [the characters] here in After the Winter, what Nettel understands with such sensitivity, are the contradictory desires we have to both live alone in our apartments, our self-made mausoleums, and to escape them, to leave them behind and seek out human connection.” —Arkansas International

“Nettel transfixes with this insightful and painfully poignant novel, which examines the bonds between people, the degrees of intimacy and commitment we allow ourselves and the toll isolation can take upon the soul.” —Glasgow Herald

“A wonderful reading experience.” —Book Riot

“Guadalupe Nettel is a brilliant anatomist of love and perversity, and each new book is a revelation.” —Katie Kitamura

“Guadalupe Nettel’s After the Winter is a dazzling excavation of the glimmering particularities of consciousness, and how a collision of fates can transform our inner worlds. This taut, atmospheric novel is an ode to the complicated heartbreak of loving what will forever be just out of reach.” —Laura van den Berg

“Guadalupe Nettel is a luminous writer of dark humor and wild insight. After the Winter is a deeply compassionate story about love, about how hard it is to know another—let alone ourselves—in all our strange glory. Yet, in the end, it is also a story about how essential it is, in spite of the pitfalls, to try.” —Nick Flynn

“Beautiful, melancholic and universal . . .” —Brazos Bookstore

Praise for Guadalupe Nettel:

“One of the fascinating qualities of this book is the unsparing testimony, somewhere between religious confession and secular disclosure, that gives a sharp sense of a woman’s harrowing girlhood. . . . Nettel’s strategy yields rich rewards.” —New York Times

“A remarkable exploration into sight and the perceptions of childhood.” —Bookforum

“Nettel’s eye lightly deforms things and gives rise to a tension, subtle but persistent, that immerses us in an uncomfortable reality, disquieting, even disturbing—a gaze that illuminates her prose like an alien sun shining down on our world.” —Valeria Luiselli

“Nettel’s stories are as atmospheric and emotionally battering as Chekhov’s.” —Asymptote

“Five flawless stories. . . . Nettel offers her keen attention and sympathy to any living thing struggling to get by.” —New York Times

“Here is an utterly compelling memoir about a specifc body, which simultaneously conjures the fragility of that body, as well as the ever-shifting body of memory itself. Nettel has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold.” —Nick Flynn

“It has been a long time since I’ve found in the literature of my generation a world as personal and untransferable as that of Guadalupe Nettel.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez

“The Body Where I Was Born infuses the reader with an intimate portrait of the astute and wondrous depth that children use to observe and make sense of humanity. This book is fierce and from the gut. It is a testimony of a woman finding agency in her body because it is physical evidence that connects her to the planet and the rest of humanity.” —World Literature Today

“Nettel’s work is spare, smart, and captivating.” —Signature Reads