Living Things - Paperback

by Munir Hachemi (Author), Julia Sanches (Translator)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 QUEEN SOFÍA SPANISH INSTITUTE TRANSLATION PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION

FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD

This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.

Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing...

"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." - Dizz Tate, author of Brutes

"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." - James Greer, author of Bad Eminence

"Gorgeously labyrinthine." - Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

Author Biography

Munir Hachemi's career as a writer began with them selling their stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. They are the author of Cosas vivas (2018, translated as Living Things, 2024) and El árbol viene (2023, translated as The Mulai, 2026), and are also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, they appeared on Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list.

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.