Monastery

Best Translated Book Award Longlist

“Offer[s] surprise and revelation at every turn.” —

“Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —, author of

In , the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon’s critically-acclaimed returns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, and border towns to a private jazz concert in New York’s Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, and Israel, where he escapes from his sister’s Orthodox Jewish wedding into an erotic adventure with the enigmatic Tamara. His passing encounters are unforgettable; his relationships, problematic. At once a world citizen and a writer who mistrusts the power of language, he is pursued by history’s ghosts and unanswerable questions. He is a cartographer of identity on a compelling journey to an uncertain destination. As he draws and redraws his boundaries, he confronts us with the limitations of our own.

Eduardo HalfonThe Polish BoxerNew York Times