Abyss

Praise for Pilar Quintana

“Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn’t know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them.” —YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

“How can I sum up everything that fascinates me about Pilar Quintana. Her incredible lyricism. Her path against the unexpected. The tension—razor-sharp, poetic and uncompromising.”—SARA MESA

“Pilar Quintana is pure literature.” —LARA MORENO

“Quintana has an impressive ability to tell truly deep stories that outwardly appear quite simple. Precise and concrete, her characters so human it’s impossible not to empathize with them.”— SARA JARAMILLO KLINKERT

Praise for Abyss

2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

"A bourgeois apartment becomes a lush green jungle in this vivid, restrained story of the generational burdens of motherhood, as told by Claudia, a resilient eight-year-old named after—who else?—her mother. The treacherous domestic terrain of Abyss offers the keen-eyed Claudia an early education in adult selfishness and betrayal, and Pilar Quintana’s subtle, affecting evocation of that terrain—which loses nothing in Lisa Dillman’s masterful English translation—is a triumph of perception and representation." —National Book Award Judges Citation

“An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

“Claudia, the 8-year-old narrator of Pilar Quintana’s Abyss, lives in an apartment so overgrown with plants she calls it “the jungle.” Outside, the city of Cali, Colombia, is “gloomy and desolate, like the inside of a very old house.” She’s frequently left to her own devices, her mother too engrossed in celebrity tabloids like Hola! and Vanidades, her father working late at the family supermarket. Quintana’s spare, atmospheric novel, succinctly translated by Lisa Dillman, explores Claudia’s high anxiety and the terrors of the adult world.” —Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

“A terrifying vision of what it means to inherit our parents’ fears and disillusionments. Perhaps Pilar Quintana’s greatest achievement is to immerse us in Claudia’s phantasmagorical jungle without us really noticing, before swiftly unveiling a daughter’s fantasy to a be a mother’s painful reality; to remind us that phantoms are all the more frightening when they are real.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A vivid and compelling exploration of family dynamics and the damage they can do, Abyss is a tale to fall into and learn from.” —New Internationalist

“Chasms, both within the earth and between people, can be hard to bridge, as Pilar Quintana (The Bitch) reinforces in Abyss, her mesmerizing novel translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Abyss is a riveting story of regret, opportunities squandered and the fear that family misfortunes will persist through generations.” —Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

“Abyss, Pilar Quintana’s second novel to appear in English, is—like its predecessor The Bitch, also translated by Lisa Dillman—concerned with the fraught relationships between caregivers and their dependents. All that there is to praise about this novel—the complexity of emotion it evokes in a reader, the success of its child narrator, the undercurrent of dread in its descriptions—must be credited as much to Dillman as to Quintana. A deeply humane exploration of relationality, Abyss is unafraid to look into its own namesake for the truth.” —Cecilia Weddell, Asymptote

“In Abyss, published in Spain in 2021, Quintana goes further into the persistence of disenchantment among women. This time the narrative’s voice is Claudia, a woman in her mid-40s who recalls moments growing up in the Colombian city of Cali with her mother and father. She was seven or eight years old then, the time of her first Communion. (…) Quintana is a master of restraint and the paced accumulation of significance. (…) Claudia speaks as one who has peered at the world and its humans. Quintana gives her room to observe the ordinary and the landscapes of Colombia – as well as the secretive maneuvers of adults.” —Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“Quintana (The Bitch) is an award-winning novelist who captures the world of an eight-year-old girl living in ’80s Cali, Columbia with remarkable perception. Though she is growing up in relative comfort, Claudia’s family is unstable. Her unhappy mother reads popular magazines and is having an affair; her father is always working and not a big communicator. Claudia worries that she will be abandoned by her parents and her beloved tía. The title refers to that dark place a child fears might envelope her. Quintana crystallizes the emotions and insecurities of an adolescent who is yet to comprehend the actions of adults even as she witnesses their behavior.” —Melanie Fleishman, Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore

“What are the abysses that a girl, stunned by the mysteries of her family and the world, peers into? Her apartment is a jungle, her home a supermarket, her country a fog-enclosed mountain range obscuring the cliffs. Readers too fall, stunned, into Pilar Quintana’s abyss.” —HÉCTOR ABAD

“Pilar Quintana has created a powerful story that contrasts with the hopeless and doomed atmosphere that surrounds the protagonist. In subtle and brilliant prose, in which nature connects us with the symbolic possibilities of literature, the abysses are both real and intimate.” —JURY, Alfaguara Novel Prize 2021

“In a powerful, unsettling voice, Pilar Quintana explores the fears of childhood alongside the fragility and violence of adults. With lucidity, innocence, suspense and the labyrinths of desire, she draws an unforgettable map of the heartrending road to freedom.” —IRENE VALLEJO

“A voice of strength, one that takes us to the world of a young girl confronting adult reality from a visionary childhood, a truly important voice that resides in each of us and makes this novel so moving. Abyss is Pilar Quintana’s triple jump.” —ANA MERINO

“A work built around small details that can define an entire continent.” —Vogue

“A novel about women condemned to unfulfilled lives that avoids oversimplification through the opacity of its protagonist and the lovable, almost naive tone, which nonetheless fills the narrator’s gaze with pain.” —Babelia

“In Abyss, something is on the verge of snapping, a rope being pulled by social impositions at one end and the protagonists’ true desires at the other, dangerous as a jungle.” —InfoLibre

“Literature should speak to the universal, the human. Abyss speaks to questions that will intrigue any reader, anywhere in the world. Beneath its dialogue, we can hear all that is not said.” —XAVIER VIDAL, Nollegiu Bookstore

Praise for The Bitch

“The Bitch distills entire social, ethical, and cultural universes into a potent short novel, thanks to Pilar Quintana’s remarkable eye for detail and Lisa Dillman’s spare yet stirring translation. Set in a coastal town in Colombia, this novel is populated by complex characters outlined with minimalist strokes of absolute precision, and offers a startling, profound portrait of frustrated desire that will stay with the reader for a long time to come.” —JURY, National Book Awards (USA)

“Set on Colombia’s Pacific coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in the narration until the very end.” —World Translations Review

“Pilar Quintana’s novella manages to tackle, with the lightest of touches, a striking range of profound themes, from poverty and class inequality to loneliness, loss and repentance. … This is a wonderfully nuanced meditation on family ties and society’s demands, and the central relationship between Damaris and Rogelio is both touchingly tender and grittily believable.” —New Internationalist<

“A very sensual book that gets under your skin. An overwhelming exploration of maternal desire in the beautiful landscapes of Colombia.” —LEÏLA SLIMANI, author of The Perfect Nanny

“A searing psychological portrait of a troubled woman contending with her instinct to nurture is at the heart of Colombian writer Quintana’s slim, potent English-language debut. The brutal scenes unfold quickly, with lean, stinging prose. Quintana’s vivid novel about love, betrayal, and abandonment hits hard.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“The magic of this sparse novel is its ability to talk about many things, all of them important, while seemingly talking about something else entirely. What are those things? Violence, loneliness, resilience, cruelty. Quintana works wonders with her disillusioned, no-nonsense, powerful prose.” —JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ

“As Damaris’s and Chirli’s lives take increasingly tragic turns, their restless natures feel increasingly broadly symbolic of the difficulty of domesticating ourselves and others, even when it serves our best interests. An intense story despite its brevity. A somber and sensitive dog-and-owner tale scrubbed clean of the genre’s usual sweetness.”Kirkus Reviews

“Tough and beautiful. The language Quintana uses is concise, sober, almost laconic—it’s a ruthless language.” —HÉCTOR ABAD

“This acclaimed novella follows a woman raising a dog in an isolated community on the Pacific coast. Quintana’s depiction of the jungle is unforgettable, with its countless storms, insects and garbage washed up on the beach. This is a powerful, jolting tale about class, motherhood and rage.” —The Guardian

“The Bitch distills entire social, ethical, and cultural universes into a potent short novel, thanks to Pilar Quintana’s remarkable eye for detail and Lisa Dillman’s spare yet stirring translation. Set in a coastal town in Colombia, this novel is populated by complex characters outlined with minimalist strokes of absolute precision, and offers a starling, profound portrait of frustrated desire that will stay with the reader for a long time to come.” —JURY, National Book Awards

“Quintana recreates a wild narrative universe in which the voracity of the jungle, the rain, the sea, and the humidity frame the daily life of the characters of this short novel. The Bitch is one of the most important contemporary novels in Colombia as it broadens the places, voices, and subjectivities from which everyday life, femininity, and motherhood are depicted and narrated.” —Latin American Literature Today

“Simply perfect.” —MARGARITA GARCÍA ROBAYO, author of Fish Soup

“A vivid, powerful book, with a tragic core.” —Sunday Times

“Engrossing. The Bitch is a subtle, moving novel about a struggle to overcome loneliness in an eerie place, among memorable people and animals.” —Foreword Reviews

“Set in Colombia’s Pacific coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in the narration until the very end.” —World Translations Review

“Pilar Quintana’s novella manages to tackle, with the lightest of touches, a striking range of profound themes, from poverty and class inequality to loneliness, loss and repentance—This is a wonderfully nuanced meditation on family ties and society’s demands, and the central relationship between Damaris and Rogelio is both touchingly tender and grittily believable.” —New Internationalist

“The Bitch by Colombian writer Pilar Quintana is a devastating portrayal of the aching, unbearable weight that can be felt from guilt, violence, the drive to nurture and the need for human connection.” —Shelf Awareness

“The Bitch takes hold and won’t let go, like the snout of a ferocious animal. Even when recounting intense, profound violence, it does so with a beauty that transports readers to a jungle in which nature reminds us that deep down, we’re all just animals trying to survive solitude and sadness.” —MAYRA SANTOS-FEBRES, El País

“The Bitch does not leave us entirely unscathed. Literature—the mot juste, creative and true—can transport us to depths difficult to forget. That is the case here.” —LUIS ALONSO GIRGADO, Diario de Arousa

“This book changes you. It looks deeply into motherhood, cruelty, and just how unyielding nature can be, with its wild Colombian coastal landscape, which is as gorgeous as it is brutal. The result is unforgettable.” —MARIANA ENRÍQUEZ

“Like the themes it explores, Quintana’s prose is stark and somewhat grim. Quintana’s book is an engrossing, engaging read that can be enjoyed over a few hours, and one of the best examples of Wendepunkt—an unexpected turn of events—I have come across in a very long time.” —Harvard Review Online

“Sardonic and pitch-black, The Bitch begins when childless Damaris brings an orphaned puppy home to the shack she shares with her fisherman husband— what ensues is written with such viciousness that it slices all the way down to the bone.” —Vox

“The Bitch stands out for the great economy and literary quality of the prose and its ability to display extraordinary oppression amid great openness and geographic immensity. You can read this book without stopping—its story is told in a way that is serene, firm, and luminous.” —ALONSO CUETO, Jury for the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana

“A perfect novel in its apparent simplicity. A story to be read in one go, in which everything converges in a masterfully described small drama. It seems to be written without effort and flows naturally, leaving behind traces deep and precise, luminous and tremendous.” —ANA RODA FORNAGUERA, former Director of Colombia’s National Library

“Beautifully captures the eerie, wild setting near both the jungle and the ocean. The characters are unforgettable—a gorgeous heartbreak of a novel.” —BookRiot

“Pilar Quintana’s The Bitch is a taut, terse tale of guilt, shame, and frustrated desire. Quintana, selected as one of the illustrious Bogotá39 authors in 2007, has crafted a slim, yet powerful story sparse on the prose, yet heavy on the impact. With ample violence and brutality, The Bitch lays bare the precipitous emotional and existential toll compounding resentment and failed ambitions inevitably exact. Quintana foregoes literary flourish in favor of a direct, unequivocal style, making her new novel a tough, even tender take (despite the cruelty) on yearning, bitterness, regret, and grief.” —JEREMY GARBER, Powell’s

“This is a book suffused with privation, in which the jungle is made everyday rather than exoticized, and it’s exponentially more powerful for that. Each of its 155 pages—and its unflinching ending—are focused on showing us how Damaris’s life is inexorably stripped down to its bare nerves; language isn’t in service of aesthetics here, but of a surgically precise excavation of a life at a point of extremis.” —Bookmunch

“A searing psychological portrait of a troubled woman contending with her instinct to nurture is at the heart of Colombian writer Quintana’s slim, potent English-language debut—Quintana’s vivid novel about love, betrayal, and abandonment hits hard.” —Booklist

“Pilar Quintana weaves human nature and the chaos of the universe together with extraordinary mastery. This is a novel full of mysteries about unfulfilled desire, guilt, and the places where love still exists.” —GABRIELA ALEMÁN, author of Poso Wells

“I loved this powerful parable about rage and disempowerment. There’s a vitally important message contained here about compassion and transformation, what it means to be a caretaker for the vulnerable and needy, and who gets acknowledged for their labour in society versus who gets ignored. The class differences are subtly but powerfully captured, and the jungle setting effectively evokes a sticky, sweaty heat. An important story for our times.” —JULIANNE PACHICO, author of The Anthill

“A raw yet beautiful story about maternity and the jungle.” —HAY FESTIVAL

“Compelling to the end.” —DAVID HEBBLETHWAITE

“The world of The Bitch is heartbreakingly true, it’s there, closer than we think, and yet remains invisible.” —El País

“Pilar Quintana has created a psychological tale that sweeps and drags us like the waves of the sea.” —El Tiempo

“To narrate the baroque jungle and American sea with such sobriety is a great triumph.” —Semana

“The Bitch is far from simple in its brevity, communicating an inner universe that readers can easily identify with, by having experienced similar circumstances, reliving childhood, or relating to the portrayal of the landscape and those who inhabit it. This novel is a little gem that reminds me, in its intensity and fluidity, of The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, or The Pearl by Steinbeck.” —El Nuevo Día

“A profound and moving drama about life and destiny.” —WMagazín

“The Bitch is a meticulous novel, lugubrious and disquieting as the jungle, and as stifling as the sky described in the book, about to explode.” —MELBA ESCOBAR

“A tale narrated with skill and a steady hand.” —El Espectador

“The Bitch is a chronicle of brutal oppression against women. This novel is chilling, simple, brief, raw—a real literary event.” —La Vanguardia

“A powerful text about a woman in revolt who doesn’t fully give in to suffering. This short yet intense novel’s tour de force is its painting of a sordid violence about to explode at any second.” —Le Monde

“In three words: singular, stifling, disquieting.” —Lire

“Like Rachel Cusk, Pilar Quintana writes beyond the story. These pages flicker with hope and recurrent violence, shadows cast on and by her protagonist Damaris as she rescues a pup whose fecund, wild nature unearths primordial longing and resentments. Polished down to the line.” —KRISTEN MILLARES

“A fierce exploration of maternal desire and of unconditional love, The Bitch is a cruel, unforgettable, and deeply intelligent story. A big and beautiful discovery.” —Page des Libraires

“An extremely sad story that sinks the reader into the main character’s emotional void. With an unsparing and laconic style, Pilar Quintana shows that she is one of the most powerful new voices of Latin America.” —Deutschlandfunk Kultur

“This work is simple for the reader as far as the narrative is concerned; there are no far-fetched words or technicalities that complicate the reading. However, reading The Bitch is not easy at all because of the emotional load that Damaris’s life represents, and with it the lives of thousands of women in Colombia and the world who make this fiction a sordid reality, people who ask, shouting, that we recognize them and make them visible.” —Liberando Letras

“The central relationship of the story allows readers to learn about the harsh history of mistreatment, abandonment, injustice, and heartbreak suffered by the humble and kind Damaris. Thus, enduring the heavy humidity of the jungle that Quintana masterfully portrays, little by little the story makes readers look their own shadows in the eye. Perhaps, in this way, The Bitch is a mirror-novel: it invites us to look at what we are not, in order to recognize ourselves.” —Radio Nacional de Colombia

“Quintana uses language in such a neat way—neat in the sense of its economy—that her novel, in form if not in substance, could be compared to The Old Man and the Sea. The dogs in Quintana’s novel are similar to the dogs in such relevant novels by José Saramago as The Stone Raft, The Cave, and Blindness, works in which dogs become characters, even protagonists—in this sense Quintana’s novel is similar to that of the Portuguese writer.” —Hecho en Calí

“A short, intense, and carnal novel that deals with the harshness of life, motherhood, guilt, and the ruthless treatment of women who cannot have children in small societies outside the cities. Pilar Quintana thrills in this book where echoes of García Márquez, the Russian classics, and the cult writer Andrés Caicedo mix.” —Me Gusta Leer

“This is a novel to stay away from if you can’t bear books about dogs that end any other way than Fido lazing contentedly on a rug in front of a fireplace. But it’s also a novel that’s putting that aversion on notice by juxtaposing it with human anguish—where do we draw the line about what is too terrible to contemplate? The Bitch achieves its effect because of the author’s expert blend of tenderness, heartache, and rage; the sun comes out from behind the clouds at one moment, but just as you begin to feel the warmth on your skin, it disappears, leaving you all the more bereft for the recent memory of its light.” —MuggleNet

“A wonderfully unpretentious and at the same time meaningful novel. The way Quintana develops the life of the main character through a relationship between a woman and her dog shows great literary skills.” —SR 2 KulturRadio

“A small volume with great narrative power.” —RBB Inforadio

“This novel shows the harshness of life in close contact with nature, where one is dependent on one’s environment to survive, an environment in which infertility is not treated in clean and aseptic clinics, but rather it is assumed, kept silent, and dealt with as best as one can. This novel shows that Colombia is more than just Bogotá, the Caribbean, and Pablo Escobar; there is a rural world that does not admit any romanticizing, where women deal with their fertility problems in a wholly different way to that which we already know.” —GABRIELA ELLENA, Spanish editor

“This text combines immense novelistic power and incredible accessibility—a combination that is rare to find.” —TIFFANY GASSOUK, French editor

“Hurt. There is a lot of hurt under Pilar Quintana’s seemingly simple story, so off-handedly told. A woman, a marriage that isn’t the best of marriages, an unfulfilled wish to have a child, a dog as an ‘Ersatz-child,’ an economically precarious life in a place where nature is abundant to the point of menace. That is enough material for a hefty volume of prose, but few times have I read a novel that contains so much, yet takes up so few pages—which makes it all the more poignant. The Bitch reminded me somehow of A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, although Quintana’s novel would be that book’s more disillusioned and hardened younger sister.” —NELLEKE GEEL, Dutch editor

“I was struck by the intensity and mastery of this short, great novel: the tightly knit plot, the impressive characters, and the nature of the Colombian seaside and the jungle. The jungle and the sea circle and menace the characters, they are ubiquitous, dwarfing the humans who try to live there. The Bitch is a great literary piece about a woman’s search for her place in society and about what it means to crave a child you cannot have. It has been a while since I felt so much for a female character as I did with Damaris. And it has been a long while since I read a strong novel from Latin America as strong as this!” —CONSTANZE NEUMANN, German editor

“I read this book in one sitting, captured by the magnetism of the writing, by the spontaneity with which the author speaks the unspeakable, tells of the obscure, and reveals the evil hidden in all of us, which would otherwise remain hidden. I loved this book because it brings to light this evil and allows me to sit facing it and deal with it; I loved this book for its courage—I am convinced, in fact, that this is not just the meaning of literature itself, but also of life, and especially for women. This magical book has been a blessing, and a lesson: to never take anything for granted, and to always pay homage to our boundaries.” —ELISABETTA SGARBI, Italian editor

“Above all, I loved the style, direct to the bone, writing that is very efficient, without any fillers, but also very visual, sensitive, cinematographic—you can almost feel the humidity on your body while reading it. The story’s central concept it also very original with all its turns and surprises.” —MARIA DO ROSÁRIO PEDREIRA, Portuguese editor

“Damaris’s pain is so palpable that the reader is completely haunted by the deep-down despair that is causing it.” —The Cyberlibrarian

“It’s not the usual heart-warming dog-and-owner tale you would expect, but an important one nevertheless, and filled with harsh realities that need to be told.” —Leyla’s Blog

“This dark story of guilt and betrayal set at the edge of a menacing jungle can be interpreted at face value or as an allegory—the latter was the only way I could accept.” —Bookish Beck

“It is a terribly wonderful story, an emotional bungee jump that sent my heart racing and breaking. Pilar Quintana’s short novel is full of longing and desperate and painful.” —Scintilla

“The Bitch is an absolutely gripping and magnificent read that gets you right from the word go and takes you in deep. Its prose is simple and concise yet powerful and moving and conveys a world so vivid and detailed, in terms of characters and setting, with such precision and skill with the greatest economy of words it’s a genuine thrill and joy to read.” —Mumbling About

“The Bitch by Pilar Quintana is a beautiful novel that immediately grabs your heart and takes you on an emotional journey.” —Rajiv’s Reviews

“A fast-paced book that I read in one sitting.” —Winston’s Dad’s Blog