Oprah Daily Reveals the Cover of Mariana Enriquez’s “Our Share of Night”
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The 20th century dawned with a sense of optimism and possibility, from technological advances to artistic breakthroughs to empires in retreat, but closed out with a grim record of two World Wars, blood-rivered genocides, and widening inequities. A rising global literary star, the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez has responded to the horrors of the recent past with a singular twist on horror. Next February, Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is publishing Our Share of Night, her stirring, speculative epic, brilliantly translated by Megan McDowell and blending the sweep and innovation of Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift with the dystopian dread of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s chills and thrills. In an exclusive, Oprah Daily reveals the off-kilter, graphically seductive cover.
The composition juxtaposes bright yellow lettering—the title and author’s name, plus a blurb from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic—with an unfurled crimson hand, Satanic, long fingernails tipped in flame. “This novel took two years to write, but probably all my life to conceive,” Enriquez says. “It's about the history of my country, it's about family and heritage and bonds, it's about parenthood and friendship. It has magic. It has my obsessions. It's queer at its heart. Though it has plenty of horror and supernatural elements, it’s also deeply personal and weirdly realistic.”
Demons, ghosts, zombies, feral wolves: Enriquez’s work teems with genre-bending tropes and erotic encounters of all kinds. Sex and fear are often just two sides of the same coin. Already renowned in the U.S. for two edgy, surreal collections—Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for last year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the International Booker Prize—Enriquez here cements her reputation as an emerging literary star, tracing the arcs of a father and young son on the lam. Juan is tall, handsome, and secretive, while curious Gaspar grieves the loss of his mother in a bus accident in Buenos Aires. Endangered by forces visible and invisible, they flee the fascist death squads of Buenos Aires for the camouflage of the jungle, gifted with a kind of clairvoyance that allows them to peer into the fates of the disappeared, the slaughtered, the soul of a nation skewered by its government.
As Donna Cheng, Random House’s associate director of art, observes, “We wanted a central image that was bold and haunting, both alluring and evocative of the novel's dark themes. The hand is immediately captivating, and the flames dissolving into the abyss allude to a pivotal moment in the book. It all came together with a gothic font that complements the sharp claws, against a background of a fading dusk-blue sky.”
You Might Also Like
