Samanta Schweblin, Argentine author of Fever Dream translated into 20 languages, and three-time Booker finalist, longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and winner of prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, explores a world in which violence and horror exists with daily domesticity- as one woman taking extreme measures to escape family life, to another running away to a writer’s retreat in China. Schweblin’s Good and Evil is sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, with six stories that lure us into the shadows to confront the moinsters of everyday life- ourselves.

In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring, to go homw to her family, only to wish she could go back. In another, a sorrowful father ends himself unable to communicate with his son after a life-changing misfortune occurs under his supervision. In yet another, a dying woman calls a friend she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years- not since an accident which forever changed them both. Guilt, grief and relationships severed permeate this collection also unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive.

These collection of stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Schweblin’s words invites us in, like quicksand or a strong river’s current. These stories will insulate themselves into your heart and your bloodstream, with powerful elliptical quality that haunts, dazzled by the glare of impending tragedy.  Schweblin’s prose uses truth and tension to construct a literary universe in which the monsters of everyday life come so close to us that we can almost feel their breath. Good and Evil is translated by Megan McDowell.

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell, Picador/Knopf, £20/  $27, 192 pages