“A stark look at a traumatized city and the way privilege corrupts.”
—Elle
“Unsentimental yet unfailingly tender.”
—Salon
“Absorbing. . . . Vivid and at times surreal, this assured novel cements Pachico’s reputation as a gifted writer to watch.”
—BookPage
“[A] pitch-perfect rendering of Medellín’s many voices as they seek to reconcile their pasts with their futures. A jarring book that thrives on its many contradictions.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An excitingly strange novel.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“As in all good ghost stories—and Pachico’s The Anthill is superb—the haunting operates like a kind of blacklight, showing us how loss and trauma, invisible under ordinary circumstances, reverberate nevertheless through the life of an individual, a family, a country.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
“The Anthill foxes the boundaries between the political and personal in startling and tender ways. It’s a novel that laughs through a mouthful of blood, which scares and touches, dazzles and compels. Julianne Pachico is a truly gifted and distinctive storyteller.”
—Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
“Julianne Pachico’s brilliant and scary new novel sneaks up on you. At once a powerfully imagined reckoning with national trauma and one young woman’s confrontation with considerable privilege and terrible loss, The Anthill is fiercely original. International in scope, profoundly human in its concerns, it feels like just the kind of novel we need in unsettling times.”
—Laird Hunt, author of The House in the Dark in the Woods
“An expertly constructed literary Russian doll. Every layer of revelation deepens a kind of existential dread over the horror people are capable of and the intentional human blindness necessary to sustain it all. Pachico’s achievement is the way this intimately personal story expands into the universal and timeless to puncture first world pretense. A vibrantly intelligent work.”
—Sergio De La Pava, author of Lost Empress
“The Anthill is a layered, riveting exploration of identity and history. I loved it. A deep and original ghost story, for sure.”
—Laura Van Den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
“The Anthill is by turns profound and freewheeling, powerful and funny. Like a surreal, contorted game of hide and seek, with darkness at its centre, Julianne Pachico’s novel is seriously impressive.”
—Claire Adam, author of Golden Child
“Written in prose that disrespects established boundaries to reveal a unique and courageous voice, Julianne Pachico’s The Anthill, is the story of two young people searching for identity and belonging. In doing so, and with the lightest of touches, Pachico lays bare the trauma of life in post-peace Columbia.”
—Ingrid Persaud, author of Love after Love
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