Monday 2nd June 2025, 6:30 pm

Storysmith, 236 North Street, Bristol, BS3 1JD

We are elated to confirm that one of the most prominent and beloved Mexican authors of recent decades, Guadalupe Nettel, will be joining us in the shop to discuss her cryptic and beguiling new collection of stories, The Accidentals (translated by Rosalind Harvey). Famed for her novels and stories which excavate society’s complexities with wit and devastating power, she was nominated along with translator Rosalind Harvey for the International Booker Prize in 2023 for Nettel’s novel Still Born.

Tickets include a glass of wine. Pre-order your copy of The Accidentals (rrp £12.99) for a special discounted price with your ticket, then collect on the night!

About Guadalupe Nettel

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican author of award-winning novels and short story collections. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for theatre and film. Still Born, her most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. In 2008 she received a PhD in Literature from the EHESS in Paris. She has edited cultural and literary magazines such as Número Cero and Revista de la Universidad de México. She lives in Paris as a writer in residence at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

About The Accidentals

When an albatross strays too far from its home, or loses its bearings, it becomes an ‘accidental’, an unmoored wanderer. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event and are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown; a menacing force hovers over a fracturing family on a rural holiday; a couple and their children inhabit a stifling world where it is better to be asleep than awake; a man’s desire for a solution to his marital dissatisfaction has unforeseen consequences. Deft and disquieting, oscillating between the real and the fantastical, The Accidentals is the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.

‘Guadalupe Nettel yet again walks into uncertain terrain with these mysterious stories. There are secrets everywhere, she says, especially in life’s most intimate and familiar aspects. The Accidentals never loses its sense of things being out of joint, and Nettel explores these fears with calm and with beauty.’
— Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

‘I adored this collection, it spread its roots out within me. Nettel is an extraordinary writer.’
— Daisy Johnson, author of The Hotel

‘The Accidentals is a striking and compelling collection that searches for the extraordinary within the ordinary. Each narrative veers seamlessly from the mundane to the existential; the writing is deft, and unsettling prose imbues the work with a profound resonance. I loved these stories, mad and controlled, and brilliant.’
— Elaine Feeney, author of All the Good Things You Deserve

‘Nettel is one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature…. I envy how naturally she makes use of language; her resistance to ornamentation and artifice; and the almost stoic fortitude with which she dispenses her profound and penetrating knowledge of human nature.’
— Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

‘I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science.’
— Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast

‘Nettel is free. She has succeeded in creating an audacious narrative style all her own, a singular and fearless way of being in the world. An essential voice of the new Latin American literature.’
— Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac’s Problem

‘Slyly inventive and delightfully disquieting, The Accidentals is an incredible story collection filled with worlds both deceptively familiar and wondrously strange. A master of the form, Nettel draws each of her universes with great precision. Each story delivers a deliciously effective and haunting sting you’ll remember long afterwards.’
— Gina Chung, author of Green Frog

‘The stories in The Accidentals move through a landscape that is both foreign and familiar, mysterious and menacing, dreamy and distraught, and I had the palpable sense that anything might happen next. It is the kind of book you read in a single afternoon, gladly relinquishing the cares of day-to-day life to sink into its otherworldly submersions.’
— Jessie Ren Marshall, author of Women! In! Peril!

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