The Twilight Zone: A Novel

Written by Nona Fernández

Narrated by Raquel Beattie

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.

How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Translator: Natasha Wimmer
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696606820

Nona Fernández

Nona Fernández nació en Santiago de Chile en 1971. Es actriz, guionista y escritora. Estudió en la Escuela de Teatro de la Universidad Católica de Chile. Ha publicado el volumen de cuentos El Cielo (2000), las novelas Mapocho (2002, 2019 edición definitiva), Av. 10 de Julio Huamachuco (2007), ambas ganadoras del Premio Municipal de Literatura de Santiago, Fuenzalida (2012), Space Invaders (2013), Chilean Electric (2015), ganadora del premio Mejores obras publicadas del Consejo Nacional del Libro y la Lectura, La dimensión desconocida (2016), distinguida con el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, que otorga la Feria del Libro de Guadalajara, y el ensayo Voyager (2020). En 2011 fue seleccionada como uno de Los 25 secretos mejor guardados de América Latina en la FIL de Guadalajara. También es autora de las obras de teatro El taller (2012) y Liceo de niñas (2016), ambas estrenadas por su compañía, La Pieza Oscura. Algunos de sus libros han sido traducidos al italiano, el francés, el alemán y el inglés.

Reviews for The Twilight Zone

[Billy Justus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An absolutely unexpected find! Fascinating. At times deep. At times dark. Highly recommended.