Praise for This World Does Not Belong to Us
“Disquieting and visceral. … García Freire unearths a brilliant sense of the miraculous from the swarming and putrid subject matter. The result is beautifully macabre.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America.” —New York Times
“A wronged, bitter young man welcomes his fate in Natalia García Freire’s novel This World Does Not Belong to Us. Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge. (…) Visceral prose captures Lucas’s obsession with death, bugs, and other unpleasant aspects of life. (…) There is a strange, unconventional beauty to his morbid world—a beauty that helps him endure pain and humiliation and achieve an unnerving final calm. This World Does Not Belong to Us is a bleak exploration of how all ends in death and decay.” —Foreword Reviews
“A deliciously menacing read which I just couldn’t put down. Every word punches hard. This World Does Not Belong to Us treads the fine line between beauty and horror effortlessly.” —JAN CARSON, author of The Raptures
“García Freire manages to make us sweat with her characters. Feel the sting of their bites. This novel demonstrates a salient maturity, exudes literary knowledge, and takes risks. The writer masters the world of emotions and the words to encapsulate it.” —El País
“This book is pure beauty, pure love for the written word.” —Cope Blog
“García Freire takes us to the deepest parts of the human condition.” —Página Dos
“Full of courage and lucidity, Natalia García Freire writes against the current, she doesn’t care about buzz or dogmas. Her writing is inhabited by the voices of literary masters. What a mature novel from a twenty-nine-year-old who knows so much about life, the passing of time, old age, the absence of God and death. There are books that can only be written by those who love plants devastatingly. This is one of them.” —El Universo
“This World Does Not Belong to Us leads the reader into the deepest, darkest regions of human existence, where what is most infected and rotten becomes beautiful and liberating.” —Toda Literatura
“Why do we need to read this book? Because like all good literature, as full of inventions as it may seem, it contains a core of truth about human nature. We need to read this book because we are all parents or children and at some point we have questioned or question what it is to be a father, what it is to be a child. And above all because it tells us about a completely alien world that exists right next to us, or next to our feet—the world of insects.” —Recordo
“A maturity that leaves you breathless. This great writer forces us to lie down on the earth and be touched by insects, plants, and matter.” —Radio Nacional España
“Natalia García Freire is unbelievably young to have written a first work of such talent.” —Relatos en construcción
“There’s an echo of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo in this novel. The return home, the search for a father or at least the memory of him. The ghosts. Only here, instead of the murmurs, we have a constant buzzing of insects and the noise of animals.” —MARÍA JOSÉ NAVIA, author of SANT
“I am moved by its tenderness, the shadow of its flight, the kingdom it comes from. Insect and poverty. Larva and death.” —DARA SCULLY, author of Animal de nieve
