Un mundo huérfano
Giuseppe Caputo

FICTION | 2016 | 224 pages

WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN AWARD

In a run-down neighborhood, in an unnamed seaside city without amenities, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. Rather than being discouraged by their difficulties and hardship, they are spurred to come up with increasingly outlandish plans for their survival. Even when a terrible, macabre event rocks the neighbourhood’s bar district and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. What matters is staying together. This is a bold poignant text that interplays a very tender father-son relationship while exposing homosexuality and homophobia with brutal honesty. With delicate lyricism and imagery, Caputo is extremely original and creative producing a tale that harmoniously balances violence, discrimination, love, sex and defiance, demonstrating that the he is a storyteller of great skill.

An Orphan World is about poverty, and the resourceful ways in which people manage to confront it. At the same time, it is a reflection about the body as a space of pleasure and violence. Perhaps above all else, An Orphan World is a brutally honest love letter between a father and son.

RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE | english CHARCO PRESS | | italian ALESSANDRO POLIDORO EDITORE | indonesian I PUTU AGUS JULI SASTRAWAN

“An Orphan World is extraordinary: an unflinching anatomy of poverty and violence, a harrowingly brave exploration of desire, and also the most beautiful account I have ever read of a son’s love for his father. Caputo is a blazing new talent in world literature. Everyone should read this book!”
— Garth Greenwell
“Narrated with irreverence, wit, and arresting attention to detail, the novel is structured so that the narrator is constantly oscillating between the narrative present and his memories, creating a poignant and mosaiclike impression of his childhood and coming-of-age in abject conditions. Moving and, at times, disquieting: a piercing exploration of poverty, eroticism, and love.”
— Kirkus
“There are books that stay with you long after you put them down and one of them is An Orphan World, the debut novel from Colombian writer Giuseppe Caputo. Rich in images, registers and nuances, it’s a book you can almost read as a long, lyrical poem.”
— Morning Star
“Giuseppe Caputo’s An Orphan World has broken me. What a book! Up there with the masterworks of LGBT fiction. Reads as a tribute to the victims of homophobia (“in memory of us”) and to the resilience of queer communities. It’s weird, sexy, bloody, gruesome, and so beautiful. Also, one of the most moving father-son relationships I’ve come across in a novel too. Plus, poppers have rarely been so well rendered in fiction.”
— Gary Michael Perry
“How can someone write with so much fury and tenderness at the same time? Cruel, luminous, and chilling, Un mundo huérfano is a novel filled with life and death, a moving portrayal of affections, the body, and fiction itself. But above all, this is a jewel that I can’t stop recommending.”
— Samanta Schweblin
“Un mundo huérfano is a novel that reads like a poem. With language that has been polished to the point of satiation, it establishes a universe that is as strange as it is unique in which a father and a son decide to survive material scarcity by resorting to symbolic abundance.”
— Arcadia
“I continue to be moved, shaken, dazzled by this discovery. If you don’t know him, I present to you Giuseppe Caputo, author of Un mundo huérfano, a novel that blows up the usual and comfortable forms of literature and constructs something carefully beautiful and original.”
— Margarita García Robayo