The Bitch

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATION

In this intense, spare, brilliantly observed novel, a woman’s dangerously primal feelings are awakened when she adopts an orphaned puppy

On a bluff overlooking Colombia’s rough Pacific coast, at the edge of the jungle—a world where nothing is taken for granted –Damaris lives in a shack with her fisherman husband. Her dream of a child unfulfilled and the warmth of her marriage cooled, she has reached the age “when women dry up,” as her uncle puts it. When the opportunity arises, she takes in a motherless puppy with eagerness and immediate affection. She does not yet know the risk she is taking in forging a bond that touches her most painful losses and her tenderest yearnings.

In prose as terse as the villagers Damaris lives among, The Bitch evokes the double-edged force of the instinct to nurture and the desperate desire to be nurtured in turn.Pilar Quintana is a Colombian novelist who has also worked as a screenwriter and copywriter. The translations of her most recent novels, The Bitch and Abyss, were both shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. She has also won the Alfaguara Novel Prize and the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She lives in Bogota.

Lisa Dillman is an award-winning translator of Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American writers who teaches at Emery University in Atlanta.