The Rooftop
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In a rundown apartment building, in an unnamed city in Uruguay, a father and daughter close themselves off from the world.
"The world is this house," says Clara, and the rooftop becomes their last recess of freedom. A pet canary is their only witness.
As Clara’s connection to the outside is stripped away—the neighbor who stops coming by, the lover whose existence is only known by a pregnancy—desperation and paranoia take hold. It's a stifling embrace, and we are there with her, our narrator, dreading what we know the future holds.
Fernanda Trías
Fernanda Trías is an award-winning Uruguayan writer based in Colombia, and the author of four novels and two short story collections. Her novels The Rooftop and Pink Slime have been published in English, and translation rights to her work have been sold in twenty languages. Pink Slime was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and received Uruguay’s National Literature Prize, the Bartolomé Hidalgo Critics’ Award, and Mexico’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. In 2025, Trías became only the second writer in the history of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize to win the award twice, receiving it for The Mountain Woman, which was widely featured on best-of-the-year lists across the Spanish-speaking world.
More by Fernanda Trías
Annie McDermott
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Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2024 her translation of Selva Almada's novel Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.
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