Febrero [Chi]

While confined in a very small room during lockdown, Bernardita Muñoz started dreaming about the house where she spent the summers of her childhood. This was the starting point for Febrero (February), her debut novel. The protagonist is Rita, a girl who always spends the summer in the same sea town and ventures to discover her surroundings. The big beach, the small beach, the corner store, the abandoned house and the haunted house, the adobe house and the one with the cypresses appear with another 28 short chapters that structure the unique route of this novel: 'She walks and stops to collect pebbles, seeds, amulets, papers, shells, wood polished by the sea. She is dazed, everything shines under the summer sun and, as under the effect of a drug, the more she walks, the more she feels like walking'. But in her journeys, Rita faces not just parasols and wafers, but also class tensions on the coast and within her own family. Alejandro Zambra writes 'February is a beautiful book for many reasons, mainly for the sense of detail. I love the tone, the rhythm, the search. It's exciting, but also poignant and sad'.