The Devil of the Provinces

After a series of failures, a biologist returns to his hometown to live with his grieving mother. But in this gripping crime novel that upends the genre’s conventions, strange events unravel what he thought he knew of his past, his present, and himself.

When a biologist returns to Colombia after fifteen years abroad, he quickly becomes entangled in the trappings of his past and his increasingly bizarre present: the unsolved murder of his brother, a boarding school where girls give birth to strange creatures, a chance encounter with his irrevocably changed first love. A brush with a well-connected acquaintance leads to a biotechnology job offer, and he’s gradually drawn into a web of conspiracy. Ultimately, he may be destined to remain in the city he’d hoped never to see again—in The Devil of the Provinces, nothing is as it seems.

Publication date: September 12, 2023 

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75

Page count: 176 pages

ISBN: 9781566896788

Translated from the Spanish

Juan Cárdenas (1978) is a Colombian art critic, curator, translator, and author of seven works of fiction, most recently the story collection Volver a comer del árbol de la ciencia and the novel Elástico de sombra. He has translated the works of such writers as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Gordon Lish, David Ohle, J. M. Machado de Assis, and Eça de Queirós. In 2014, his novel Los estratos received the Otras Voces Otros Ámbitos Prize. In 2017, he was named one of the thirty-nine best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine by the Hay Festival in Bogotá. Cárdenas currently coordinates the masters program in creative writing at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá, where he works as a professor and researcher.

Lizzie Davis is a translator and a writer. Her recent projects include Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize); Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Aura García-Junco.

Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Vulture, “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023”

“Cárdenas generates queasy intrigue from something as strange as the birth of a devil child and as mundane as a text message that has been read but not replied to. . . . Briskly paced, thoughtful, and truly weird: a whodunit that takes on the very idea of blame.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“A dizzying and beguiling yarn. . . . A crime story, but one without clear answers or culprits. . . . Cárdenas describes the sweltering heat in beautifully strange terms, adding to the sense of small-town oppression, where self-deprecating jokes are ‘a kind of determinist doctrine.’ South American fiction fans will love this.”

—Publishers Weekly

"Catastrophe and grace intertwine throughout The Devil of the Provinces, as do the horror and beauty of what remains hidden. The result, in the hands of Juan Cárdenas, is hypnotic, disturbing, memorable.”

—Rodrigo Hasbún

“A supernatural thriller, a murder mystery, and a rumination on personal and environmental catastrophe—The Devil of the Provinces is none of these things and all of these things. With skillful economy, Juan Cárdenas crafts a story where everyone is complicit, even the reader. A brilliant, ambitious novel that searches for meaning in the shadows of a dangerous and ambiguous world.”

—Mark Haber