The narrator, however, sees the advantages of inhabiting the wardrobe, not least the ability to “see without being seen,” having grown his nails sharp enough to bore a hole to look through. In order for us all to fit, there must always be one, at least, inside the wardrobe.” “It’s true that this house is enormous, but there are just too many of us. Stranger to the Moon wastes no time in making the reader sit up and take notice: I stayed there six years, and I wrote Señor que no conoce la luna, because before I lived in Chía I’d never really seen the moon, as simple as that, I didn’t get to know the moon in Paris or in Barcelona.” The little brick house seemed right out of a fairy tale, but also out of nightmares. “I came back to Colombia, and after less than a week in Bogotá I fell in love and went to live in Chía, in the Cerca de Piedra district, among cows and chickens. Stranger to the Moon, now with Victor Meadowcroft as co-translator, is entirely allegory, a short novel where, in Rosero’s words “the nightmare took control of everything,” written in the late 1980s when Rosero returned to Colombia from Europe: It was followed by Good Offices (2011) and Feast of the Innocents (2015), in which Anne was joined in translation by Anna Milsom, both novels incorporating elements of the surreal, but with a clear grounding in realism.

Stranger to the Moon is a brave, powerful, and distinctive novel by a writer who arguably holds the strongest claim to the title of Colombia's greatest living author.Evelio Rosero is best-known in English for his 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winning novel The Armies, his first to be translated (by Anne McLean, who has been involved in all subsequent translations of his work). Insects and reptiles are trained as agents and spies against the naked ones, and only the most fortunate humans manage to reach old age by taking up strategic spots near the kitchens and grabbing for the fiercely contested food.

Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order inhabited by its characters.

A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house in order to serve the needs of 'the vicious clothed ones,' the novel describes what ensues when a single 'naked one' privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. His magnificent novel Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside time and place but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of his country, with its harrowing inequality and violence. The renowned Colombian writer Evelio Rosero has never been one to shy away from the darker aspects of his nation's history and society. A fantastical novel about power and subservience by the great Evelio Rosero, winner of Colombia's National Literature Prize

Stranger to the moon by evelio rosero